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
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)
