Rheum With a (re)View Aims to Increase the Number of Peer Reviewers Through Mentorship
As an editor of scientific journals, Amr H. Sawalha, MD, Rheumatology Division director and professor of pediatrics and medicine, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center (UPMC) Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, noticed the pool of available expert reviewers has been shrinking over the past several years. “Other fields have been seeing the same thing, so this issue is not unique to rheumatology,” he says.
Dr. Sawalha
When Dr. Sawalha accepted the post as chair of ACR’s Committee on Journal Publications (CJP) in 2021, he was instrumental in initiating a mentoring program to address the need.
We recently spoke with program mentees and a mentor about their experiences.
Ideas to Action
Under Dr. Sawalha’s guidance, the peer review mentoring program began to take form. The idea had been in the works prior to his term as committee chair. Rheum With a (re)View was designed to give young rheumatologists—postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members—lessons on the mechanics of proper peer review. The editors of the ACR’s three journals—Arthritis & Rheumatology, Arthritis Care & Research and ACR Open Rheumatology—were asked to suggest mentor reviewers. A CJP subcommittee was formed to review and score applications, which included personal statements from applicants about their goals and what they hoped to learn from a structured approach to peer review.
The subcommittee initially selected 13 mentors, asking for a two-year commitment. The response from the community of mentors was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, Dr. Sawalha recalls. Each mentor was assigned two to three mentees, and many mentors stayed involved for a third year.
Each participant in the one-year program first focuses on online training modules, then meets with their mentor, who assigns papers to review based on their area of expertise and/or interest. After successfully completing three reviews, participants receive a certificate of completion.
Dr. Ferucci
Reasons to Participate
Elizabeth D. Ferucci, MD, MPH, research physician and rheumatologist with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, Anchorage, was one of the original cohort of reviewers. She recalls her response to the invitation to become a mentor.
“I thought back to my early reviews for journals and recalled having no specific training in peer review, despite having significant research training during my fellowship,” she says. “I understood that mentoring junior peer reviewers was an important area of need. I enjoy reviewing manuscripts for journals and have developed my own system over time, so I was happy to be able to share that with new colleagues.” She is currently in her third year with the program.
Dr. Risal
One of Dr. Ferucci’s mentees, Ujjwol Risal, MD, FICR, obtained his degree in internal medicine from B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, Nepal, in 2017. In 2020, he completed a two-year fellowship in Clinical Rheumatology at Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Lalitpur, Nepal, one of the first two fellows receiving formal rheumatology training in the country. He is currently working as the sole rheumatologist at the B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences.
Over the past couple of years, he says, “I’ve developed a keen interest in research and have published a few papers myself. I felt like I needed some training to sharpen my skills.”
Working with his mentor has been very helpful, he reports. “The feedback has been very supportive, which has helped me build my confidence.”
Rheumatology is now a budding field in Nepal, he notes, and the interest in research is growing. “If we have trained reviewers, these people can sift out good papers from bad ones—and they can contribute to the system as a whole,” he says.
Dr. Mathias
Kristen Mathias, MD, is a third-year postdoctoral fellow in rheumatology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She is on the T32 research pathway and foresees having a research career. The mentoring program, she says, “has been helpful to see the review process and then juxtapose that with my own writing of manuscripts.”
Value of the Program
Ali Yagiz Ayla, MD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, was involved in reviewing case reports and small studies when he saw the ACR notice for applications. “I joined this program because I wanted to learn from somebody who does this regularly,” he says.
Dr. Ayla
Dr. Ayla notes that each mentee in his group is at different level in their career—there is one resident and another doing a fellowship—while he is still early in his career. This mix, he says, “makes our discussions even more exciting.”
Shreyas Patil, MBBS, now in his second year of residency at the Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education, Scranton, Pa., saw enrollment in Rheum With a (re)View as a way to become more oriented with research in rheumatology.
Dr. Patil
“In this day and age, there is a lot of data out there,” he says. “Being able to ask the right sort of questions and come up with the right sort of research is important at this juncture. That’s what makes a person a great researcher and what will advance the field in the long run. Being involved in this peer review program has definitely opened my eyes to that.”
“I’m always a fan of getting more training, so that’s what I was looking for out of this program,” says Natalya Surmachevska, DO, who recently became an assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology, Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. She enrolled in the mentoring program while a fellow at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and reports that the program gave her exactly what she was looking for: “The training taught us to review a paper from A to Z in a standardized way.”
The teaching modules were especially helpful. “The modules were a good baseline so that everyone starts in the same way and understands the concepts of academic integrity,” she says. “It’s good to have a formalized method, to have it written down and then to have the ability to approach this in a standardized way. That gives you [the reviewer] confidence.”
Respect for the Process
The mentees with whom we spoke embrace the responsibilities involved in the peer reviewing process, thoughts which align with Dr. Ferucci’s view and her approach to being a mentor.
“I definitely consider any review from the point of view of both the author and the reviewer,” she says. “From the author’s perspective, receiving a review that is perceived as completely negative or that has unclear implications for revising the manuscript can be demoralizing. A couple things I coach mentees to do are to give comments that help the author understand what value their work has to the field and to provide them with very specific feedback on steps they need to take to address any issues with the manuscript.”
Dr. Mathias’s experience with the program has yielded more knowledge about the entire research and publishing process.
“It is easy to find methodological shortcomings in a manuscript or ways that the scientific rigor of a project could have been improved,” she says. “However, it’s important to recognize that research rarely comes without limitations. This is where the saying ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ truly resonates. Through the process of manuscript review, you come to appreciate that [although] some aspects of methodology or presentation may not be flawless, the validity of the underlying science and the conclusions drawn are ultimately what matter most.”
Dr. Surmachevska
Dr. Surmachevska believes reviewing papers is a big responsibility. “It’s more of an active role than I had previously thought it would be. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the replies we’ve received from the authors who put so much effort into answering the reviewers’ questions and comments.”
Participants Encouraged
The Rheum With a (re) View participants with whom we spoke unanimously endorse the value of participating in the program. Dr. Ayla strongly recommends the peer review mentoring program for anyone interested in publishing.
“By reviewing manuscripts, you start to see everything with a critical eye, and it helps you with your own manuscripts,” he says.
Additionally, the program has illuminated the publishing process. It’s a “two-way street: if we expect others to dedicate their time and effort to reviewing our work, it’s only fair that we contribute to reviewing as well,” Dr. Ayla says.
Dr. Patil, who obtained his MBBS in Bangalore, India, says that, at first, he encountered some challenges with a steep learning curve as he reviewed his first paper. “But by the time I started the second paper, I was quite pleasantly surprised that I knew exactly what to look for, and what kind of parameters I had to keep in mind,” he says.
He voices a palpable enthusiasm for the program, saying “If you are like me and do not know where to start, the ACR has welcomed me with wide and open arms. All the people have been fantastic—especially Dr. Ferucci.”
Benefits of the Program
“The benefit of this program goes beyond just our journals. As you can see, we have international trainees,” Dr. Sawalha says.
Dr. Tsao
That diversity is a great strength of the program, according to Betty P. Tsao, PhD, professor of medicine and SmartState/Richard M. Silver Endowed Chair in Inflammation Research, Division of Rheumatology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, who accepted the post as the new CJP chair in November 2024. She was an associate editor of Arthritis & Rheumatology for 10 years and encountered difficulties securing peer reviewers for papers submitted to the journal.
“It’s to Dr. Sawalha’s credit that the program includes international participants,” she says. “He spent a lot of effort on this, and it is my sincere hope that more potential mentors can spare some time to share their pearls [of wisdom] with the younger generations.”
Dr. Ferucci would absolutely recommend the mentoring experience to other rheumatology colleagues. She says, “In addition to getting an opportunity to mentor new peer reviewers, you get an opportunity to meet rheumatologists you might not otherwise meet. For example, I’m based in Alaska and have mentored people all across the U.S. and even currently have a mentee in Nepal.”
Gretchen Henkel is a health and medical journalist based in California.
