Are systematic reviews and more traditional review articles handled any differently?
Whilst there is variation in editorial policies between leading anesthesia journals in the selection of both topics and authors for review articles and editorials, the majority of journals prefer to select topics and commission work rather than favor unsolicited material. In deference to the wishes of the minority of editors, we have not identified individual journals in our results. We are not aware of any previous work examining how editorials and review articles are selected in the anesthesiology and related literature. This is not unusual. Little is known about the internal workings of medical journals, including the peer review system, in general2. Peer review began essentially to share the editorial workload of journals and only latterly has become regarded as a quality control mechanism in biomedical publication3. This probably explains the diversity of organization of peer review systems in different journals. The whole peer review mechanism has been termed a ‘black box’4 and i
