Collective Conversational Peer Review of Journal Submission: A Tool to Integrate Medical Education and Practice

In this study, we demonstrate a collective collaborative, conversational, pre-publication peer review of a randomized controlled trial.

Using Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist, a group of research-oriented undergraduate medical and pharmacy students and their teacher collectively on an online forum, discuss and review a randomized controlled trial submitted to the Annals of Neurosciences and the explanatory commentary from each reviewer makes a basic scaffold for critical appraisal of the manuscript.

This method provided the opportunity for students to engage in online interactive training and allowed them to understand tools used for critical appraisal of a study. Students were incentivized by the potential publication credit and they look forward to continuing this work and perhaps providing one small step to making medical education more interactive.

Open peer review involving a group of reviewers at a time produces multidirectional reviewing concepts, thus helps to improve the quality of paper and also may reduce the time between review and publication.