De invloed van peer review en redactionele bewerking op de kwaliteit van oorspronkelijke stukken in het Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde; beoordeling door lezers

To investigate whether peer review and editing have an effect on the quality of original articles published in the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (Dutch Journal of Medicine, NTvG).

Design

Panel investigation.

Setting

Editorial offices of the NTvG.

Methods

The submitted, accepted and published versions of 50 original articles which were published in the NTvG were submitted to 25 medical students, 25 recent medical graduates, 25 general practitioners and 25 medical specialists for evaluation. Each article was evaluated by one evaluator from each group. With the aid of scoring forms, the phase of peer review (the submitted vs. the accepted version) and the phase of editing (the accepted vs. the published version) were evaluated with regard to 23 and 16 features respectively, all on a 5-point quality scale. The results were analyzed dichotomously (the frequency of a score ≤ 2 vs. a score ≥ 3).

Results

In the phase of peer review, according to the scores given by the evaluators, the quality of 1423 features (61) had improved significantly, with especially significant improvement in the overall presentation (p = 0.00001) and the general medical value (p = 0.00001). The phase of editing had resulted in improvement in 1116 features (69), with marked improvement in the style (p = 0.0001) and the readability (p = 0.004). There were no detectable differences between the evaluations of the students and those of the medical graduates, the general practitioners and the medical specialists.

Conclusion

According to the readers, both peer review and editing improve the quality of the original articles submitted to and published in the NTvG.