Mariana Lopes

BackgroundPeer review remains a cornerstone of scientific knowledge dissemination, yet comprehensive, practically relevant training is limited. This inspired us to develop Peerspectives, a peer review training course for doctoral students in the biomedical sciences in Berlin, Germany. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Peerspectives course on editor-judged quality of peer review reports.MethodsDoctoral students in health research fields who enrolled in the Peerspectives course between October 2020 and August 2022 were invited to participate in the study, and 80 consented. The ~18 week-long course provided training on the structure, purpose, and conduct of peer review and editorial processes in biomedical journals. It included 12 h of lectures, homework assignments, and 12 h of hands-on, small-group workshops, during which students reviewed original research manuscripts currently under consideration at The BMJ under the guidance of experienced mentors. The primary outcome was the overall quality of the peer review reports as judged by two independent BMJ editors using the global score of the Review Quality Instrument (RQI) pre- and post-intervention. Additionally, we compared participants’ post-course scores with those of actual BMJ reviewers. We also compared participants’ self-assessed knowledge and skills related to scholarly peer review (1–5 Likert scale) before and after the course.ResultsAfter course completion, the editor-assessed overall quality of the participants’ peer review reports was higher than before the course (median increase of 0.5 points, p < 0.001; mean increase of 0.36 points, p < 0.001). The RQI scores of participants’ post-course reports were not non-inferior to those of actual BMJ reviewers for the same manuscripts. Self-assessed peer review-related knowledge skills increased across all questionnaire items after course completion. Greatest improvements were seen in understanding reviewer expectations (increase in means from 2.9 to 4.5), confidence in reviewing (2.5 to 3.9), and knowing what to look for while reviewing (2.8 to 4.2).ConclusionsProviding doctoral students with comprehensive training resulted in an editorially significant increase in review report quality and improved understanding of the role and expectations of peer reviewers in the scholarly publishing processes and confidence in giving constructive feedback.Pre-registrationhttps://osf.io/vndcx.

Este artículo se propone analizar las representaciones narrativas de las migraciones centroamericanas hacia los Estados Unidos, en su paso por México, tal como son elaboradas en las novelas Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas (2013), del escritor mexicano Alejandro Hernández y La mara (2004), del también mexicano Rafael Ramírez Heredia. Nos enfocaremos en dos temas que consideramos de mayor importancia en ambas obras para comprender la Centroamérica de hoy: el papel que juega el concepto de camino para el migrante de Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas (2013) y el de entre-lugar en La mara (2004). La reflexión que planteamos en este artículo forma parte de una discusión más amplia desarrollada en nuestra tesis doctoral, que tuvo como eje central las migraciones centroamericanas hacia los Estados Unidos y las representaciones que de estas se hacen en la narrativa contemporánea de la región centroamericana. Interesan de manera particular esos dos textos porque trabajan de manera diferente ambos aspectos –el cronotopo del camino y la noción de entre-lugar–, al mismo tiempo que forman parte de un creciente corpus de novelas que tienen como tema central los movimientos migratorios en la región.