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

6 GARFIELD: REFEREEING AND PEER REVIEW, PART 1 ence.

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4 It evolved in response to the development of scholarly societies and the scientific journal. I summarized this and other work in an earlier essay on the changes in scientific communication over the past 300 years.

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5 According to David A. Kronick, professor of medical bibliography, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, "science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...differed ir many ways socially, intellectually, am economically from the science of tintwentieth century."

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6 Although associations and societies promoting scholarly activities had existed for hundreds of years,

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7 (p. 46), the social role of "scientist," as well as conventions for doing research, had yet to emerge.

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6 In fact, Kronick notes, "individuals did not begin to regard themselves as scientists rather than philosophers until the seventeenth century."

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7 (p. 34) The learned journal as we know it today also traces its origins to the seventeenth century, with the founding of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and the Journal des Sqavans, associated with the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

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4 By the early eighteenth century, Kronick says, members of these and other scholarly societies sponsoring official or, semiofficial publications began to realize that if scholars were to have confidence in the content of these journals, then material submitted for publication had to be critically evaluated before it was published.

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6 Societies thus began to take measures to preserve their credibility. Some adopted strict regulations governing publication that members had to comply with to retain their membership. And by the mid-eighteenth century, according to Kronick, some

—such as the Royal Society of Medicine of Edinburgh, Scotland

—had developed techniques of evaluating and approving manuscripts before publication that are almost indistinguishable from today's system of refereeing.

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6 Kronick, incidentally, is the author of a recent book on the literature of the life sciences that includes a short section on the refereeing and the publication process in that branch of science.

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8 The procedures involved in refereeing a manuscript vary from journal to journal and from field to field, but there are certain general steps that virtually every paper has to go through before it is published. Among the first steps an editor takes, whether or not the journal is refereed, is to evaluate a submission's compatibility with the scope and style of the journal, according to Robert A. Day, consultant, ISI Pres^

8 , and former managing editor, American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journals.

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9 Once this is done, an editor must then choose appropriate referees for a given manuscript. Donald Christiansen, editor, IEEE Spectrum

, conducted a survey of referee selection practices among 26 of the IEEE Transactions editors. Common sources from which referees are recruited include widely recognized experts, members of a journal's editorial board, professional acquaintapces, previous referees, and scientists cited in the author's references.

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0 Sometimes authors are asked to supply a list of suggested referees. A few journals are using manual and computei^assisted bibliographic retrieval methods to select referees. For example, Stevan Hamad, editor, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS

), reports that BBS staffers search a microcomputer file of the journal's referees that has been coded by areas of expertise. They also search the current biobehavioral literature through the Science Citation Index® and the Social Sciences Citation Index® for additional referee candidates.

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1^ Usually two referees are chosen, according to Claude T. Bishop, director, Division of Biological Sciences, National