• journals
• publication
• fraud
• peer review
• statistical methods

I have just read your editorial “To review or not to review”.¹ I can attest to the dominant prevalence of gatekeepers among reviewers. I seem to encounter nothing but gatekeepers in my attempts to publish.

When I read your unique and astonishing admission that the “obsessive reviewer” who reanalyses the author’s data is “extraordinarily rare,” I immediately thought, “Aha! Suspicions confirmed.” The presumptive, rather presumptuous, confidence in medical editorial diligence that my mentors attempted to promulgate in my training at journal club meetings seems unjustified if, as you seem to imply, and as I have long suspected, editors and reviewers usually verify neither analyses nor conclusions of scientific submissions. If they don’t do that, what good are they? If they don’t do that, how can they justify publishing such results?

If the rarity of the “obsessive reviewer” is widespread, it, along with Sivakumaran’s letter on the “academic cartel”,² goes a long way toward explaining the rejection …