Improving the efficiency of scientific grant review and journal peer review

Peer review—the process through which independent experts in the field assess scientific research—remains a cornerstone of scientific research and serves as a crucial gatekeeper for grant funding and publication. However, as the scientific community expands and the number of publications rises, the peer review load has increased significantly. Simultaneously, the ongoing debate about research reproducibility and waste has identified non-publication of “uninteresting” (i.e. null) results, as well as incentive structures that encourage the publication of novel, eye-catching findings that convey a clean narrative, as significant contributors to the poor reproducibility of much biomedical research. Nicotine & Tobacco Research has implemented a number of changes in recent years to improve the quality and reliability of the research we publish and adopt the Transparency and Openness in Reporting principles.

The Registered Reports approach, founded in 2013 and has been embraced by 50 journals to far, is one proposed strategy aimed at improving the quality of published research. Unlike traditional research publications, choices about whether or not to publish Registered Reports are made based on the relevance of the research subject and the techniques offered to solve it. Importantly, this choice is taken before the start of data collecting. This has the critical benefit of lowering the opportunities and incentives for biassed research techniques (e.g., exploiting analytical flexibility to obtain statistical “significance”), boosting methodological transparency and statistical power standards, and minimizing publication bias (by offering in principle acceptance before the results are known). Nicotine & Tobacco Research has stated that it will accept Registered Report submissions, focusing on attempts to duplicate significant field discoveries.

References

Marcus R. Munafò, PhD, Improving the Efficiency of Grant and Journal Peer Review: Registered Reports Funding, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, Volume 19, Issue 7, 1 July 2017, Page 773,