Stephen Penford Lock CBE FRCP (born 8 April 1929) is an English haematologist and editor who served from 1975 to 1991 as editor-in-chief of the UK medical journal, the British Medical Journal, known since 1988 as the BMJ . [1] A prominent scholar of the peer review process, he coined the term "journalology" to refer to the scientific study of the academic publishing process. [2] In 1990, Eugene Garfield described him as "an elder statesman of biomedical editing". [3]
Lock was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, and St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, where he trained in haematology. He worked at St Bartholomew's Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, and other hospitals before joining the BMJ. He originally began working at the BMJ in 1964 as an assistant editor, and was promoted to the positions of senior assistant editor and deputy editor before becoming editor-in-chief in 1975. [3]
In 1982, while editor of the BMJ, he introduced its Christmas edition, which contained many humorous articles, as well as interesting historical stories about medicine. This light-hearted edition has since become an annual tradition, [4] although in recent years the humorous elements have been less emphasized. Lock also changed the journal's peer review system by introducing a "hanging committee", consisting initially of two clinicians and two of the journal's official editors; the committee was responsible for choosing papers to publish in the BMJ from a pool of submissions recommended from outside reviewers. The term "hanging committee" reflected the kind of activities that an art gallery would undertake in deciding whether to hang particular works of art.
Lock was a co-founder, with Edward Huth, of the Vancouver Group (later the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors), and a former president of the European Association of Science Editors. [5]
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research.
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, published by the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMJ has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Previously called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988, and then changed to The BMJ in 2014. The journal is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA). The current editor-in-chief of The BMJ is Kamran Abbasi, who was appointed in January 2022.
Richard Smith CBE FMedSci is a British medical doctor, editor, and businessman.
In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.
Science by press conference or science by press release is the practice by which scientists put an unusual focus on publicizing results of research in the news media via press conferences or press releases. The term is usually used disparagingly, to suggest that the seekers of publicity are promoting claims of questionable scientific merit, using the media for attention as they are unlikely to win the approval of the scientific community.
Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI), Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.
Medical Hypotheses is a not-conventionally-peer-reviewed medical journal published by Elsevier. It was originally intended as a forum for unconventional ideas without the traditional filter of scientific peer review, "as long as are coherent and clearly expressed" in order to "foster the diversity and debate upon which the scientific process thrives." The publication of papers on AIDS denialism led to calls to remove it from PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine online journal database. Following the AIDS papers controversy, Elsevier forced a change in the journal's leadership. In June 2010, Elsevier announced that "submitted manuscripts will be reviewed by the Editor and external reviewers to ensure their scientific merit".
The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.
The Medical Journal of Australia is a peer-reviewed medical journal published 22 times a year. It is the official journal of the Australian Medical Association, published by Wiley on behalf of the Australasian Medical Publishing Company.
Michael John Godfrey Farthing is British emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, where he was previously its vice-chancellor (2007–2016). His early academic career was in medicine, specialising in gastroenterology.
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
Nicholas Thatcher is Professor of Oncology at the University of Manchester, in the School of Cancer and Imaging Sciences at the Christie Hospital NHS Trust and Wythenshawe Hospital; he was appointed to the position of Professor in 1996. He received his PhD from Manchester University, after prior education at the University of Cambridge and St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, London.
Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Namely, the rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom is zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
Sir Patrick John Thompson Vallance is a British physician, scientist, and clinical pharmacologist who has worked in both academia and industry. He served as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of the United Kingdom from 2018 to 2023.
Conflicts of interest (COIs) often arise in academic publishing. Such conflicts may cause wrongdoing and make it more likely. Ethical standards in academic publishing exist to avoid and deal with conflicts of interest, and the field continues to develop new standards. Standards vary between journals and are unevenly applied. According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, "[a]uthors have a responsibility to evaluate the integrity, history, practices and reputation of the journals to which they submit manuscripts".
Journalology is the scholarly study of all aspects of the academic publishing process. The field seeks to improve the quality of scholarly research by implementing evidence-based practices in academic publishing. The term "journalology" was coined by Stephen Lock, the former editor-in-chief of the BMJ. The first Peer Review Congress, held in 1989 in Chicago, Illinois, is considered a pivotal moment in the founding of journalology as a distinct field. The field of journalology has been influential in pushing for study pre-registration in science, particularly in clinical trials. Clinical trial registration is now expected in most countries. Journalology researchers also work to reform the peer review process.
Ian Greville Tait was a British medical doctor who spent most of his career as a general practitioner (GP) in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. He was a major figure in the modernisation of general practice in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s. According to Stephen Lock, former editor of the BMJ, Tait's work "helped transform general practice into a major medical specialty, giving family physicians a status equivalent to hospital consultants."