In 2024, CCTS 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
Sujith V Cherian, Lyndon B Johnson Hospital, USA
April, 2024
Mikkel Nicklas Frandsen, Zealand University Hospital, Denmark
February, 2024
Sujith V Cherian
Sujith V Cherian, MD, FCCP, DAABIP, is Director of Interventional Pulmonology and Pleural diseases, Lyndon B Johnson Hospital and Associate Professor in Divisions of Critical Care, Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine, University of Texas Health-McGovern Medical School, Houston, Texas. Dr. Cherian earned his medical degree at the Government Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, following which he completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the SUNY Upstate Medical University. He then did his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine and interventional pulmonology at the University of Texas Health-McGovern Medical School and UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. His research area covers pulmonary diseases, pleural diseases, medical thoracoscopy, interventional pulmonology in resource limited settings, and rare lung diseases. His recently co-edited a book on Rare Lung diseases, published by Taylor and Francis publishers, came out in print in March 2023. His ongoing projects are Predictors for spontaneous pleurodesis with indwelling pleural catheters for malignant pleural effusions; Medical thoracoscopy in resource limited settings. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Dr. Cherian reckons that peer review forms the cornerstone in medical literature. Good peer review is essential in any form of medical literature, be it case reports, images, review article, or original articles. While it not only helps improve quality and assess the suitability for publication, but it also helps to improve the credibility of the journal.
In Dr. Cherian’s opinion, some degree of bias is inevitable in any peer review, and the fundamental basis of a healthy peer-review system should aim to fully minimize this as possible. Blind peer review done by at least 2-3 reviewers helps minimize this and should be normal components of a healthy peer-review system. Moreover, he thinks that meaningful peer review should involve a good understanding of the authors’ intent, constructive criticism and more than just superficial correction of grammatical mistakes. Within this context, if English is not the author’s native language, then a review by a native English speaker would be helpful to bring out the intended meaning. It is necessary that novice authors are given value, with the consideration that every reviewer or medical expert started out in this fashion at some point in their career. It is within this realm that he would say constructive criticism to bring the best work forward and subsequently an excellent manuscript would be of the utmost importance.
“I am absolutely honoured to review for the CCTS and when journals ask me to peer review, I feel it is a testament that they consider my publications and research of significant value. Along the same lines, there is always a lot that I learn when I perform peer review, as it may be highlighting new advances in the field or unusual or rare aspects of diseases, which overall help me to be a better clinician. Providing timely peer reviews is extremely important and hence committing to more than two journals at any time should be strongly discouraged, in my opinion,” says Dr. Cherian.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
April, 2024
Mikkel Nicklas Frandsen
Mikkel Nicklas Frandsen, a Ph.D. in Surgical Sciences from the University of Copenhagen, currently is employed as a postdoctoral fellow at Zealand University Hospital in the Center for Surgical Science, where he is going into Big Data and clinical data science primarily in colorectal cancer, but his hope is to expand on this. He has an interest in perioperative optimization amplified by his mentor professor Henrik Kehlet, with a specific interest in perioperative immunology, pain, and physical pre- and rehabilitation.
The Danish word for “Science” is “Videnskab”, which translates directly to “knowledge creation”. In Dr. Frandsen’s opinion, science, and scientists by that extension, have a creative power. Peer review is one of few checkpoints for controlling that power and ensuring that the created knowledge is trustworthy, valid, and reliable with the highest degree of certainty possible. With the advent of large language models, peer review is becoming more and more important than ever before, since the threat of fake science is ever growing.
Dr. Frandsen believes that reviewers should remember that they are humans and subject to just as many biases as the authors. Reviewers should also remember that both the editors and authors are also human and should act accordingly. Remember to act human, be nice and respectful. Although peer reviewing is an important process that should be taken seriously, he believes it sometimes crosses over into being overly formal and stiff, so remember to be human and have fun with it too.
According to Dr. Frandsen, it is crucial for authors to share their research data. Openness in science, including sharing not only data, but also methods for analysis (for example, code) is vital for quality controlling the process the authors went through. Furthermore, when working with Big Data, often the amount of data is a limiting step. Sharing datasets is a step on the way of solving that problem. Attempts should be made to harmonize data and national ethics committees should provide guidelines for how to handle sensitive information.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
