The Scientist - USA (2020-01 & 2020-02)

12 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

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O

n November 4, 2019,The Scien-

tist ran a revealing Q&A high-

lighting a recent survey pub-

lished in eLife. Responses from early

career researchers (ECRs) and other

scientists drew attention to a wide-

spread, unethical practice to which aca-

demic scientists have too long resigned

themselves—peer review ghostwriting

(8:e48425, 2019).

As defined in that paper, peer review

ghostwriting occurs when scientists

hand over manuscripts that they have

agreed to review for journal editors to

graduate students or postdocs in their

research groups. The involvement of the

junior scientists is not typically disclosed

to the journal, so editors work under the

impression that the invited reviewer

developed and wrote the resulting man-

uscript review themselves.

Survey results reported in the eLife

paper provided the first quantita-

tive evidence for the prevalence of this

practice, as well as for the practice the

study authors refer to as co-reviewing.

In a strict sense, co-reviewing happens

when a trainee is involved in developing

and writing the review and their contri-

bution is disclosed to journal editors.

Some consider this transparent form of

collaborative peer review a valuable part

of scientific training, and the eLife study

authors even argue that journals should

codify co-review. But in my experience,

the involvement of co-reviewers is some-

times not disclosed to the journals, just

as is the case with ghostwriters.

Whether co-reviewers are named

or not, this practice, along with the

more patently unethical ghostwrit-

ing, has no defensible place in the live

Exorcising Peer Review Ghosts

Training young scientists to review submitted manuscripts should be

an academic exercise, not a facet of professional scientific publishing.

BY JAMES L. SHERLEY

CRITIC AT LARGE