“Select Crowd Review” – First Follow-Up

In August 2021, we announced a new modality for peer review in The Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeon: “Select Crowd Review” (SCR).[1] Here is a short summary of what happened to it. A more comprehensive publication is in the works and will follow soon.

As a reminder, upon submission, authors are given a choice if they wish to accept the new review modality SCR. If so, a pre-selected “crowd” of reviewers is invited. Anonymized pdfs of manuscripts are made accessible to the crowd upon invitation per email via an online platform provided by “Filestage” (https://filestage.io) for 10 days. This intuitive platform allows to enter anonymized comments directly into the text. A formal structured review is not required. The SCR Editor (Roman Gottardi) summarizes the annotations and gives a recommendation. Both, commented PDF and summary, are sent back to the authors through the Editor-in-Chief. The aim is to achieve a rapid and broader, and thus fairer, review process.[2] For the initial trial period a regular peer review by at least two people was also done to compare results and to be on the safe side.

We started out with a 45 reviewer-strong crowd for the OC (Original Cardiovascular) manuscripts in July 2021 and made a first analysis after half a year. The results were presented on September 9, 2022, at the 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication in Chicago. Roughly half of the authors were happy to enter the experiment. For all manuscripts which then underwent a complete review process the crowd's recommendation was unequivocally that of the standard reviewers. This encouraged us to continue to collect more data. Furthermore, we have now extended the SCR option to OT (Original Thoracic) manuscripts after having won Henning Gaissert, a veteran reviewer of the journal and Editorial Board member, as our Thoracic Select Crowd Editor. He helped to establish a second, thoracic, crowd. Again, the whole process is conducted scientifically and will still undergo critical scrutiny at regular intervals. The respective reports will be published, starting with the first one-year analysis, announced above.

Meanwhile, if you feel you would like to be part of one of our dynamic crowds, helping to advance scientific methods of publishing, drop us a note ([e-mail]). We'd be more than happy to hear from you.

Publication History

Article published online:
12 October 2022

• References

• 1 Heinemann MK, Gottardi R, Henning PT. “Select Crowd Review”: A New, Innovative Review Modality for The Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeon. Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2021; 69 (05) 387-388
• 2 List B. Crowd-based peer review can be good and fast. Nature 2017; 546 (7656): 9 DOI: 10.1038/546009a.