Validation of the CoRE Questionnaire for a Medical Journal Peer Review

If a peer review instrument asks concrete questions (defined as items that can only generate disagreement if reviewers have different degrees of expertise), then questionnaires could become more meaningful in terms of resolving subjectivity thus leading to more reviewer agreement. A concrete item questionnaire with well-chosen questions can also help resolve disagreement when reviewers have the same level of expertise. We have recently created the core-item reviewer evaluation (CoRE) questionnaire for which decision-threshold score levels have been created, but which have not been validated. This prospective validation of these thresholds for the CoRE questionnaire demonstrated strong agreement between reviewer recommendations and their reported score levels when tested prospectively at Clinical Medicine and Research. We conclude that using the CoRE questionnaire will help reduce peer reviewer disagreement. More importantly, when reviewer expertise varies, editors can more easily detect this and decide which opinion reflects the greater expertise.