Peerspectives: peer review training initiative for the biomedical sciences

Peer review is a key component of the current academic publishing landscape, and yet, the vast majority of early career scientists never receive formal training on how to conduct such reviews.

PEERSPECTIVES is a semester-long course for PhD students in the health data sciences that provides theoretical background knowledge needed for high-quality peer review practice and a thorough, critical examination of the scientific publishing system and processes. These elements will be supplemented by hands-on workshops, in which “live” BMJ manuscripts will be reviewed in small groups under the supervision of experienced editor-mentors. We hope this combination of lectures and workshops will equip students not only to provide more concise, comprehensive and coherent feedback effectively, but also to write higher quality manuscripts of their own. In addition, the course will offer students the opportunity to listen in on a manuscript meeting of the BMJ editorial staff.

This training is of extreme relevance and importance to our target group of up-and-coming scientists, the large majority of whom will complete publication-based PhD dissertations. In its current format, we have designed the course for methods-focused doctoral students in the domains of medical, biomedical and population health in collaboration with the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
To evaluate whether the completion of this program within the ongoing doctoral studies framework has an effect on the quality of peer-review among motivated doctoral students, we will conduct a confirmatory study with pre-/post- assessment.

同行评审是当前学术出版领域的关键组成部分，然而，绝大多数早期职业科学家却从未接受过如何进行此类评审的正规培训。PEERSPECTIVES 是为健康数据科学领域博士生开设的一门为期一个学期的课程，旨在提供高质量同行评审实践所需的理论背景知识，并对科学出版系统及流程进行深入、批判性的审视。这些要素将由实战工作坊补充，其中“实时”的 BMJ 手稿将在经验丰富的编辑导师的指导下以小团队形式进行评审。我们希望这种讲座与工作坊的结合能够使学生不仅能够更有效地提供简洁、全面且连贯的反馈，还能够撰写出更高品质的原创稿件。此外，该课程还将为学生提供聆听 BMJ 编辑部手稿会议的机会。此培训对我们目标群体——即将崭露头角的一大批科学家——具有极大的相关性及重要性，其中绝大多数人将完成基于发表的博士论文。在当前格式下，我们与英国医学杂志（BMJ）合作，为以方法研究为导向的医学、生物医学和人群健康领域的博士生设计此课程。为了评估在博士研究框架内完成此项目是否对有动力的博士生同行评审质量产生影响，我们将进行一项前后评估的验证性研究。