Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)

EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 1. Opinion and Conjecture on the Effectiveness of Refereeing

EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 1. Opinion and Conjecture on the Effectiveness of Refereeing Current Contents, August 4,1986 Peer review is so much a part of the fabric of scholarly inquiry that it is often taken for granted. I have written many essays over the years that are directly or indirectly related to peer review. These include several on authorship

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3 and editing,

4 faculty evaluation,

5 identifying Nobel-class science through citation analysis

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—and even a few on various aspects of refereeing itself.

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2 But I have never before discussed the intricacies of the system in detail. Since the subject is central to scholarly life, we have decided to devote a three-part essay in Current Contents® to it. The first two parts will cover refereeing for publication. Part 1 examines how the refereeing system works and lists some of the common opinions about its advantages and disadvantages. Part 2 will cover scientific studies of refereeing and some proposed alternatives to the present system. Part 3 will follow later and will focus on the peer review of grant proposals. Note that I distinguish between a referee (one who evaluates an article before it is published) and a reviewer (one who evaluates already published material or, in the case of grant reviews, research-grant proposals). I generally use the term referee to mean one who advises editors on the publishability of a scholarly manuscript. The process by which this advice is solicited I usually call refereeing, but occasionally reviewing or peer review seems appropriate. The term peer review is also used to denote the evaluation of research proposals; more generally, it can refer to the professional review of patient records by special committees of physicians that many hospitals use to maintain highquality patient care. Refereeing: How It Came About and How It Works Refereeing is meant to ensure that articles submitted for publication meet the accepted standards of their fields. Like editing, refereeing is a complex intellectual, political, and social process; it often involves a spectrum of activities that blend into one another in complex ways, in a fashion similar to the range of practices related to ghostwriting.

5 Among many who have expressed the idea, Peter Amiry, former editor, Journal of the Operational Research Society

, wrote in an editorial that referees are an editor's insurance policy, providing a reservoir of knowledge that few editors could hope to match.

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3 The practice of refereeing manuscripts prior to publication is now well established, but it was not always so, state sociologists Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton, Columbia University, New York, in their classic 1971 study of patterns of evaluation in sei-