Where do our reviewers come from?

In this issue we acknowledge the help of over 2,500 evaluating the importance of the research question and in reviewers who produced more than 10 000 reports since helping targeting key questions. we took office in June 1995. There is only limited What does this mean? We think it means that young information on the quality of such reports and on the way reviewers should be recruited by editors as soon as editors select new reviewers and thereby consolidate and possible, which means in practice after a first authored expand the backbone of their journals. Although editors and not reviewers make decisions on the fate of manuscripts, it is obvious that an editor will not easily accept a paper when it has received negative reviewer’s reports. On the other hand positive reports are no guarantee that a paper will be published because page limitations force editors to make priority decisions [1]. The characteristics of good reviewers have been assessed on the basis of information from the Journal of General Internal Medicine [2]. The outcome of this analysis was a little surprising in some aspects. Good reviewers were young, had received research training (J Gen Intern Med is a clinical journal), had an additional degree to a MD and that came from an institute with prestige. It also helped when they were known by the editor and when the authors were blinded to the reviewer. Time spent on the review was another positively correlated factor. The membership of an Editorial Board had no effect and there was a trend to an inverse relation between academic rank and performance. Assistant professors and fellows tended to do better than associate professors, whereas the latter did better than full professors. Surprisingly, the publication record of the reviewer was not significantly correlated with the quality of the produced reports. It has been suggested that young reviewers perform well because they spend a lot of time on a review and that older, more experienced reviewers would be better capable to put the work in perspective [3,4]. The latter was not confirmed by the study of Evans and colleagues [2]: younger reviewers were also better at Fig. 1. Changes in the geographical distribution of the reviewers of Cardiovascular Research between 1995 and 1999. USA: United States of *Corresponding author. Tel.: 131-20-566-3265; fax: 131-20-697America; UK: United Kingdom; NET: Netherlands; GER: Germany; JAP: 5458. Japan; FRA: France; CAN: Canada; ITA: Italy; AUS: Australia. 1995: On behalf of the Editorial Team. Reviewers by 1 June 1995; 1999: Reviewers by 1 October 1999.