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

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)