Keeping High Standards – The art of being a good reviewer

Colin Binns
John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Public Health, School of Public Health and Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin University

Peer review is “the critical assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts who are not part of the editorial staff”. All medical journals rely on a large number of volunteer reviewers to assess every article submitted to their journal. With the increasing number of articles being submitted for publication, most journals have had to implement a two stage review process. In the first stage members of the editorial board will assess an article for applicability to the journal and then screen for quality. Articles that have the possibility of acceptance for publication are then sent for independent review, usually by two or three reviewers.The review process initially follows the ROVE format. Some of the major points are listed below and these and others will be explored in the workshop

• Research question(s). eg are they clearly stated and address in the literature review, methodology, results and discussion section.
• Originality. If the study is an original one – is that actually correct?
• Validity of the study. Sample selection and size, methodology, results, statistical analysis
• Ethics – is there valid approval from an institutional ethics committee? The most common reasons for rejection of a paper are a lack of proper ethics approval and problems with the sample selection and size.

Other issues that will be discussed include commercial sponsorship of research and reviews, declaration of commercial interests and the use of ghost writers. The role of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and statements of the CONSORT group will be discussed.

In addition to just saying “no” the art of reviewing includes identifying research that will benefit individuals and communities and encourage authors to correct the shortfalls in their papers. The ultimate aim of journal publishing (and reviewing) is to improve the health and well being of our communities.

How to run a successful journal

Deborah Kahn
BioMed Central

The workshop will cover various ways in which editors can make their journals more successful including attracting the right articles, publishing the right content,  getting your content seen by the right readers, getting indexed in the right places, what your publisher can do for you.

Evaluating journal performance

Koh Ai Peng
University of Malaya Library

Have you wondered about the performance of your journal/s and compared it with other journals? This workshop will give you hands-on to evaluate your journals using two evaluation tools, namely JCR and SciMago. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is to evaluate journals indexed in ISI Web of Science and SciMago is for journals indexed in Scopus.What if your journals are not indexed in ISI Web of Science or in Scopus? You will be shown how to evaluate your journal performance using the cited references in ISI Web of Science.

Organizing references

Janaki Sinnasamy
University of Malaya Library

Having trouble organizing your references? This workshop will give you hands-on to create, organize, format and list references using two of the commonly used bibliographic softwares, namely; EndNote and Mendeley . Both are useful tools for editors to save time and effort proofreading references. EndNote is available as a complimentary to database subscription. Mendeley is a relatively new web service free-of-charge (for now, at least). Both can be used with MSWord. Mendeley can extract metadata, full text and cited references from the actual papers in PDF Format whilst Cite as you write is an important feature of EndNote.