Judge the article, not the author.

couple of months ago, the members of the World Association of Medical Editors have had a lively discussion on whether a student can be the author of an original article. All the respondents agreed that as long as a person fulfills the authorship criteria and conducts the research in a universally acceptable way, no matter what his or her stance is, there is no objection to name him or her as the author of an article. To support this claim, one even gave a reference to an article published in JAMA one of the authors of which was then an 11-year-old child (1). That discussion turned a wheel in my mind to examine this situation in a short essay from some other points of views – as a researcher and an editor. This issue has major relevance with peer review. Although it has many limitations, peer-review is still the best available means used by editors to assess the suitability of a manuscript and to judge its merits for publication in scientific journals (2). Editors have always been looking for ways to improve the quality of peer review. It was thought that if we do not let reviewers become aware of the authors' identity, the fairness and the quality of peer review would be increased since it is believed that the manuscripts of well-known authors may be reviewed less critically (3). Therefore, many journals blind the referees to the authors' identity. However, complete blinding is not always possible , is time consuming, and in practice a reviewer can often figure out who the authors are from the clues left in the article (4-6). On the other hand, it was shown that, masking reviewers to authors' identity, at least in the way we usually do in biomedical journals, does neither significantly improve nor worsen the quality of peer review (7,8). Although in most instances we cannot separate an " author " from his or her " article, " the " article " is indeed the most important part since it is the final stage of a research study and it is the piece that would affect the body of evidence and our practice, no matter who the author is. Knowledge about the author just may help us to decide whether it was possible to conduct the work in his or her center or not. For many successful works the fame of the …