In 2024, FOMM reviewers continue to make outstanding contributions to the peer review process. They demonstrated professional effort and enthusiasm in their reviews and provided comments that genuinely help the authors to enhance their work.
Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding reviewers, with a brief interview of their thoughts and insights as a reviewer. Allow us to express our heartfelt gratitude for their tremendous effort and valuable contributions to the scientific process.
January, 2024
Bruno Chrcanovic, Malmö University, Sweden
March, 2024
Pratik K Sharma, Queen Mary’s University of London, UK
April, 2024
Ana Paula Negreiros Nunes Alves, Federal University of Ceará, Brazil
June, 2024
Rodolfo Reda, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
January, 2024
Bruno Chrcanovic
Bruno Chrcanovic is Associate Professor at the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and Oral Medicine, Faculty of Odontology, Malmö University, Sweden. He graduated in Dentistry (DDS) at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1999, got a Master of Science degree in Materials at the CDTN/CNEN, Brazil, in 2012, and a PhD degree, with focus on dental implants, at Malmö University, Sweden, in 2017. He has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and his research is currently centered around dental implants, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and oral pathology. Learn more about him here.
The central goal of the conventional peer-review system, according to Dr. Chrcanovic, is to ensure scientific rigor and robustness of the information presented in manuscripts to improve or maintain scientific integrity and progress. To him, reviewers play an important role in this process. First of all, reviewers should be humble enough to recognize that they are up to the task, and do not accept to review a manuscript only to add some other qualification to their CVs, nor if they have certain conflict of interest. Then, the reviewers need to verify if the manuscript that they were appointed to review fits their field of knowledge. They need to elicit positive behavior and constructive feedback without being unclear towards the authors, and need to execute the task of reviewing the manuscript in the timeframe established by the journal. Last but not least, the reviewers must behave ethically. Based on the experience of nearly 700 manuscript submissions to peer-reviewed journals, Dr. Chrcanovic has noticed that it has become a common practice for many reviewers to request authors to include their own references in the manuscript being reviewed, even that these references do not really have a direct relationship with the subject of the study, or even when they have, these references do not add anything that would be considered necessary or important to the study being reviewed. These suggestions/requests are done very probably to boost citations of these reviewers and consequently increase their h-index.
Dr. Chrcanovic regards a healthy peer-review system to be one in which the editorial team are vigilant to the reviewers’ behavior, mostly when it comes to ethics. Editors should support initiatives designed to reduce research and publication misconduct, and to educate researchers about publication ethics. Moreover, the editorial board should comprise researchers from different institutions and disciplines to minimize biases and increase the likelihood of impartial evaluation. Anyone involved in the peer-review process must treat the manuscripts received for review as confidential documents. To him, there are many other points to consider, and it is always valid to check the guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Lastly, aiming to minimize the potential biases during review, Dr. Chrcanovic points out that journals need to adopt, by default, a double-blind review process, in which not only the authors are unaware of the reviewers’ identity (something that is usually adopted), but also the reviewers are unaware of who the authors of the manuscript are.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
March, 2024
Pratik K Sharma
Dr. Pratik K Sharma is a qualified dentist. He obtained his BDS Degree with Distinction from Guy’s Dental Hospital in 1999. He went on to complete a three-year full-time specialist orthodontic training program at The Royal London Hospital. He obtained an MSc degree in Orthodontics from the University of London, achieving a distinction for his research thesis, and subsequently went on to complete his Membership in Orthodontics from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He is currently appointed as a Senior Clinical Lecturer/Honorary Consultant in orthodontics at Queen Mary’s University of London/Royal London Hospital and also works part-time in specialist private practice. Dr. Sharma has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals with areas of research interest that include: clinical trials in orthodontics, facial/smile aesthetics and orthognathic surgery. His research has attracted international acclaim being awarded the coveted B.F. and Helen E. Dewel Award for Clinical Research in 2020 from the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dento-facial Orthopaedics. In addition, he was awarded the Chapman prize from the British orthodontic society in 2020. Learn more about him here.
In Dr. Sharma’s opinion, peer review can be defined as a process that subjects research or scholarly enterprise to other experts in a similar sphere of practice for structured scrutiny. The process is intended to refine and ensure through scientific evaluation only the highest-quality research is published. Furthermore, the process of peer review aims to improve the quality of submissions that are judged publishable by recommendations to authors on how to improve the quality of the submission.
“Bias can be limited by culturing an environment that limits it. It is important to be conscious of decision that are prone to bias,” says Dr. Sharma. He points out that following an objective decision-making process with a clear understanding of the process, competencies and scoring process reduces the influence of bias. Furthermore, during the process, peer reviewers must try to ensure that a credible rationale is given for all decisions and that this is reflected in the outcomes given.
Peer review forms a part of Dr. Sharma’s role as a clinical academic within a teaching university environment. Although the process of peer review can be time consuming, he finds it an enjoyable and rewarding sphere to his professional practice for a number of reasons. Most notably, its helps keep him abreast of innovations and developments within his speciality and reading new scientific manuscripts is an effective way to achieve this. Peer review further helps stimulate personal research ideas. As such, he dedicates administrative time within his agreed job plan to be able to carry out peer review for a number of journals.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
April, 2024
Ana Paula Negreiros Nunes Alves
Ana Paula Negreiros Nunes Alves is a full professor of Dentistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Dentistry and Nursing of the Federal University of Ceará (Brazil), working in the subjects of Oral Pathology and Patients with Special Needs. She is a permanent professor in two postgraduate programs, one in Dentistry and the other in Translational Medicine, both at the Federal University of Ceará, with the following lines of research: epidemiology of soft tissue and bone lesions in the mouth, oral cancer, chemonecrosis of the jaws, oral repercussions of systemic diseases, tumor biology and morphological changes in drug-related toxicity. Her current research projects cover the areas of oral cancer, osteochemionecrosis of the jaws and association between heart disease and dental biofilm.
Dr. Alves thinks that peer review is essential to guarantee the excellence of research through the analysis of the results obtained and the conclusion of the research.
In Dr. Alves’ opinion, evaluators should read the article critically, understand the results and be sensitive to discovering the difficulties in carrying out the research. This feeling is essential to be fair. Though peer reviewing is often anonymous and non-profitable, she thinks that it is the love of science that motivates her to do so.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
June, 2024
Rodolfo Reda
Dr. Rodolfo Reda got the Bachelor degree in Dentistry with full marks at Sapienza University and PhD degree in Innovative Technologies in diseases of the skeleton, skin and oral-cranial-facial district at Sapienza University of Rome. He was the speaker at National and International Congresses, author of numerous publications about endodontics, implantology, eental prosthesis and oral microbiology (from Scopus: 87 Documents, H-index 22, 938 Citations). As an affiliate associate professor in University of Medicine Tirana, he is also a distinguished adjunct professor at Saveetha Dental College and Hospitals, and Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS). Learn more about him here.
In Dr. Reda’s opinion, peer review allows the article to be subjected to criticism, hopefully as constructive as possible, by authors who know the topic well or who have published extensively on that topic. This allows for a notable increase in the quality of the manuscripts, considering that they not only have to pass the quality control by the journal itself, but must also be subjected to several rounds of checks by experts in the specific research area.
According to Dr. Reda, to minimize any potential biases during review, the journal must favor a review that is without conflict of interest, and must therefore guarantee the reviewer an advantage in carrying it out in the most complete and high-quality way possible. He believes that the greater the advantage that the journal offers, with equal control, the better the quality of the review of the manuscript sent by the reviewer.
“I believe that the possibility of previewing different works represents a fantastic mental exercise that allows you to think better and, probably, obtain better results. Offering high-level results, in terms of revisions, motivates the authors to be more precise in writing the manuscript, the other reviewers to be very careful so as not to disfigure themselves, and to obtain recognition from the journal,” says Dr. Reda.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
