Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health

Introduction: The number of peer-reviewed biomedical journals has more than tripled over the past 20–25 years increasing the demand for quality peer reviewers. This demand and the lack of available formal training in peer review have resulted in a shortage of qualified peer reviewers. In response to this shortage, the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine Special Issue in Education (Special Issue) developed a formal mentored peer-review (MPR) program that provides a learning experience in peer review to educate fellows through legitimate participation while contributing to the editorial process of the journal. The latter serves as the basis of this study.

Methods: The impact of the MPR program on the Special Issue’s reviewer pool served as the primary outcome of this study. This was accomplished by tracking the number of participating fellowships and their graduates who subsequently provided independent peer reviews for the sponsoring journal. Comparisons of MPRs generated by education fellows and their fellowship directors to those generated by our nonmentored faculty reviewers served two secondary outcomes: the quality of peer reviews and time from peer review offer to submission of the requisite peer reviews.

Results: Over a period of five years, 82 fellows mentored by 43 fellowship directors submitted 147 MPRs. Of the 60 MPR graduates (35%), 21 were retained as independent peer reviewers. Based on a five-point editorial scoring scale (5 being excellent) mentored peer reviews received significantly higher editorial ratings (4.13 [SD 0.8]) than nonmentored faculty reviews (traditional reviewers) (3.33 [1.04]) and independent reviews by program graduates (3.61 [0.84]] (P < .001). We evaluated two peer-review turnaround periods. The first was the time from the initial two offers to review until two offers had been accepted. Instances where the first two offers were randomly made to MPRs were compared to offers to nonmentored faculty reviewers. The latter group took 60.2 (32.0) days compared to the MPR group, which averaged 17.2 (16.7) days (P < .001). The second interval measured the time from reviewer acceptance of the peer review until they submitted their completed review. There was no difference between the time in days between MPRs (10.4 [7.9]) and nonmentored faculty (9.4 [8.1]) in submitting reviews that had been accepted.

Conclusion: The mentored peer-review program contributed to increasing the Special Issue’s reviewer pool with reviews of higher quality. In addition, by inviting two mentored peer-reviewers initially as compared to nonmentored faculty reviewers, the time frame for obtaining two secured peer-reviewers was significantly reduced. These findings demonstrate that a formalized approach to learning peer review by partnering with academically oriented fellowships has the potential to improve the availability of peer reviewers, the quality of peer reviews, and efficiency in the editorial review process.