In 2024, JOVS reviewers continue to make outstanding contributions to the peer review process. They demonstrated professional effort and enthusiasm in their reviews and provided comments that genuinely help the authors to enhance their work.
Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding reviewers, with a brief interview of their thoughts and insights as a reviewer. Allow us to express our heartfelt gratitude for their tremendous effort and valuable contributions to the scientific process.
February, 2024
Karthik Balakrishnan, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, USA
June, 2024
Uberto Bortolotti, University of Padua, Italy
July, 2024
Joshua Lyons, Cleveland Medical Center, USA
August, 2024
Fumitsugu Kojima, St. Luke’s International Hospital, Japan
February, 2024
Karthik Balakrishnan
Dr. Balakrishnan is a pediatric otolaryngologist specializing in the care of children with complex disorders of breathing, voice, and swallowing. He has expertise in complex surgical reconstruction of the larynx (voice box) and trachea (windpipe); innovative approaches to pediatric airway reconstruction; and in vascular anomalies of the head and neck. He has interests in improving the quality, safety, and value of paediatric surgical care, reducing costs of care, and optimizing the patient, family, and caregiver healthcare experience. Dr. Balakrishnan joined the Stanford University Department of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital faculty as associate professor in early 2020. With this appointment, he also took on the role of medical director for surgical performance improvement at Stanford Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. In 2022, he was appointed the Susan B. Ford Surgeon-in-Chief of Stanford Medicine Children's Health and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Learn more about him here.
Dr. Baladrishnan believes that a reviewer should possess the qualities including an open mind, a spirit of constructive criticism to help authors improve their manuscript, ability to see the article from a reader’s perspective, without bias during peer review.
In addition, Dr. Baladrishnan indicates that it is difficult for everyone to allocate time to do peer review. It requires a commitment to the idea of peer review as an essential component of advancing clinical care. With practice, a review can be done quickly and still with high quality.
According to Dr. Baladrishnan, he thinks data sharing is very important, both to promote integrity and transparency and to allow others to learn more from the work. However, he thinks the value of sharing data is not the same for every manuscript, so this can probably be done selectively to avoid a glut of less useful data.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
June, 2024
Uberto Bortolotti
Dr. Uberto Bortolotti graduated at the University of Padua, Medical School, Italy, in 1972. He has done his residency in the same University where he obtained the title of specialist in General Surgery and then in Cardiac Surgery. In 1983, he obtained a fellowship in research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York under the leadership of Prof. Robert WM Frater. During this period, he was interested in testing various biological tissues and prostheses in the animal. Later, he became Associate Professor of Cardiac Surgery in Padua and was then appointed as Full Professor of Cardiac Surgery in Pisa and chief of the Cardiac Surgery Division. He has published more than 500 papers mostly in peer-reviewed international journals. He is the senior member of the AATS and STS. He has retired in 2018.
Dr. Bortolotti thinks that the role of peer review is fundamental in selecting submitted articles and maintaining a high level of scientific production. However, he indicates some limitations of the existing peer-review system. In his opinion, the widespread birth of on-line journals has lowered the quality of published papers. The fact that currently most articles are published not free-of-charge implies that on-line journals have an extremely low rate of rejections despite unfavourable peer reviews. If a journal charges for publication, it obviously will be more prone to accept even low-quality articles.
“I like to review articles on my field of expertise when asked. This happens for many journals, including JOVS. Besides, since I am currently retired, I have more free time to dedicate to this task,” says Dr. Bortolotti.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
July, 2024
Joshua Lyons
Joshua Lyons, MD, is a fellowship-trained general surgeon at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Case Western Reserve University. He is board-certified by the American Board of Surgery.
He attended medical school at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and completed his residency in general surgery at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, where he served as chief resident, followed by a fellowship in Flexible Endoscopy-Foregut. Dr. Lyons is very active in general surgery and endoscopy research and has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He has presented his research at regional, national and international conferences and meetings. He is a member of several professional organizations, including the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, the American Medical Association, and the Ohio State Medical Association.
JOVS: What role does peer review play in science?
Dr. Lyons: Peer review plays a crucial role in the field of science by serving as a quality-control mechanism for research and scholarly work. There are many aspects of peer review that enhance the applicability and validity of scientific research. It provides for quality assurance, validation and credibility, dissemination of quality-controlled knowledge, and provides a community consensus regarding the research. Without peer review, research would be untrustworthy with unchecked amounts of potential bias and misrepresentations.
JOVS: Peer reviewing is often anonymous and non-profitable, what motivates you to do so?
Dr. Lyons: Peer review offers many benefits for the scientific community in general and personal benefits as well, despite being anonymous and non-profitable. It of course ensures data being published are of the highest quality and will improve patient care in the future. It is also an avenue to contribute to the scientific community, keep current on the latest research, and allow for networking and collaboration. Lastly, as an academic physician, there is a professional responsibility to uphold the integrity and rigor of published scientific research.
JOVS: Why is it important for a research to apply for institutional review board (IRB) approval?
Dr. Lyons: It is important for research to apply for IRB approval primarily to ensure the ethical conduct of research involving human participants. It certifies that ethical standards are met. Regulatory compliance allows for a thorough risk assessment. It enhances the credibility and validity of the research. And most importantly, it protects the participants and ensures they are not subjected to undue harm during the research process. If this process was omitted, there can be ethical concerns with the research, legal consequences, publication issues, and may impact funding for the research. Therefore, it is imperative that all research studies that involve human subjects applies and obtains approval from an IRB.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
August, 2024
Fumitsugu Kojima
At St. Luke’s International Hospital, Dr. Fumitsugu Kojima serves as a consulting and teaching practitioner of minimally invasive thoracic surgery, and also as the Chair of the Institutional Research Ethics Board. As a member of the board-certified proctors, he has been instrumental in the development of Surgery 3.0, specifically in the promotion of safe robotic surgery. Now in the era of Surgery 4.0 (augmented or navigated procedures on a digital surgery platform), he has been leading “Precise Sublobar Resection (PSR)” for lung cancer, as a board member of the PSR Interest Group. His current interest is in the articulation of the conceptual and technical framework for the forthcoming paradigm, Surgery 5.0, Participatory Surgical Care. In particular, this means implementing and improving Patient Flow Management Systems that enable the following features: 1) patient empowerment, shared decision making; 2) prehabilitation for operation; and 3) post-op online follow-up and rehabilitation.
In Dr. Kojima’s opinion, peer review is regarded as a fundamental and irreplaceable component of the academic process. However, as the volume of published articles continues to grow, the need for rapid evaluation has intensified. Concurrently, the content itself has become increasingly intricate and specialized. In order to guarantee the fairness and transparency of the review process, it is becoming increasingly common to publish the names of reviewers and the points they make. Furthermore, the time and burden of the review process also appear to be increasing. The current reliance on volunteer reviewers is proving to be inadequate in addressing these challenges. It is imperative that contributions to science as a reviewer be widely recognized as an achievement. This can be realized through registration with PUBLON or ORCID, or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Furthermore, a system whereby a reviewer receives a financial incentive in submission would serve to enhance competitiveness mainly for commercial-based journals.
Dr. Kojima thinks that in medical research, which deals with living organisms rather than theories, the presence of bias is unavoidable. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the bias is kept within scientifically acceptable limits and that the research leads to conclusions and messages that take account of bias and limitations. The same applies to Conflicts of Interest (COIs), and disclosure of COIs can only be managed on the basis of good faith. It is difficult to assess them properly during a review process. This is why the work of monitoring committees for prospective trials and the research management departments of individual research institution is important.
From the reviewer’s perspective, Dr. Kojima reckons that the most important point in the ethical review process is to check with a diverse group of members that the research has social relevance, rather than solely with the experts. Furthermore, both bias and COIs are inevitable, it is the duty of the research community to manage them appropriately. If this self-management is lost, a harmful situation is engendered, the so-called “science and technology run amok”.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
