Peer-review for selection of oral presentations for conferences: Are we reliable?

Although peer-review for journal submission, grant-applications and conference submissions has been called 'a counter- stone of science', and even 'the gold standard for evaluating scientific merit', publications on this topic remain scares. Research that has investigated peer-review reveals several issues and criticisms concerning bias, poor quality review, unreliability and inefficiency. The most important weakness of the peer review process is the inconsistency between reviewers leading to inadequate inter-rater reliability.

To report the reliability of ratings for a large international conference and to suggest possible solutions to overcome the problem.

In 2016 during the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare, organized by EACH: International Association for Communication in Healthcare, a calibration exercise was proposed and feedback was reported back to the participants of the exercise.

Most abstracts, as well as most peer-reviewers, receive and give scores around the median. Contrary to the general assumption that there are high and low scorers, in this group only 3 peer-reviewers could be identified with a high mean, while 7 has a low mean score. Only 2 reviewers gave only high ratings (4 and 5). Of the eight abstracts included in this exercise, only one abstract received a high mean score and one a low mean score. Nevertheless, both these abstracts received both low and high scores; all other abstracts received all possible scores.

Peer-review of submissions for conferences are, in accordance with the literature, unreliable. New and creative methods will be needed to give the participants of a conference what they really deserve: a more reliable selection of the best abstracts.

More raters per abstract improves the inter-rater reliability; training of reviewers could be helpful; providing feedback to reviewers can lead to less inter-rater disagreement; fostering negative peer-review (rejecting the inappropriate submissions) rather than a positive (accepting the best) could be fruitful for selecting abstracts for conferences.