3

I know what peer review of an article is, but one journal labeled an article with "Ethics"/"Peer-review: Internal peer-reviewed."

Does that basically mean that an author can select colleagues to do the review? If so, that system was abandoned in gold-standard publishing in favor of anonymity mediated by an editor or other intermediary. I want to avoid predatory journals, so I don't want to ask the publisher, and Google didn't point to much, except that some Google results (I ignore AI overviews) mention external peer review.

What's internal peer review, specifically?

Improve this question
3
  • I would guess it means it was reviewed by editors/staff of the journal, but I haven't seen it before. Is this in biology? Commented 15 hours ago
  • 1
    It would help if you posted a link to the place, so that people can glean the context. Commented 13 hours ago
  • 2
    @WolfgangBangerth On the other hand, keeping it more vague helps avoid the question stumbling into an off-topic "what's the quality of this journal?" question. Commented 13 hours ago

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I think this is likely from a section about the ethics approval for the study (for human or animal subjects research, most likely), not about the review of the manuscript for the journal.

Searching for the phrase seems to return results that fit that guess, though I can't be certain about your case.

Personally this seems a bit vague, normally I'd expect a statement that the work was approved by some sort of ethics review board for human or animal research. This statement seems to just indicate that the institution has some internal review process by peers, but I'd be guessing at the details of what that entails. It might depend on the study whether this is suitable; I'd expect some sort of independent review for a trial with an intervention but maybe not necessary for study of the standard of care or retrospective data analysis.

I don't know if this says anything about the quality of the journal but I'd expect reputable journals to expect a thorough accounting of how a study was approved.

Improve this answer
3
  • An "Institutional Review Board" very much along the lines you suppose is a mandatory thing in the U.S. and various other countries for reviewing research proposals involving human subjects. These go by a few other names, too. It sounds like you're not familiar with these, yet I think you've hit the nail on the head. Commented 8 hours ago
  • @JohnBollinger Huh? I'm very familiar with an "institutional review board". I would not describe IRB as "internal peer review", however; IRBs are not peers. So it's not clear to me if this phrase from OP's question is meant to mean some other process for review that is sufficient in certain countries or institutions, weird language used to describe an IRBs or similarly functioning committees that I am familiar with (in which case I would have expected the paper to say "This study was approved by the Bollinger University IRB, #1234567", not "internal peer review"), or something else. Commented 4 hours ago
  • I did specifically avoid describing "IRB" in my answer because this term is very US-specific; similar committees in other countries have other names and are not called IRB. Commented 4 hours ago

You must log in to answer this question.