In a survey that surprised many--and that some doubt--Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Centre in Oxford, United Kingdom, and colleagues scrounged the literature for studies that had studied peer review rigorously.
A Congressional committee notified the Food and Drug Administration yesterday that, as a result of a recall by Medtronic of a product linked to patient deaths, it was reviewing how rigorously the agency required heart device components to be tested.
"I really think the right way to do these things is to review them rigorously and not to make announcements in order to capture newspaper headlines".
This is a trade-off that was made by preferring peer-reviewed publications that were considered to have been more rigorously reviewed.
When those denunciations surfaced, History said that the scripts were incomplete and that the final drafts would be rigorously reviewed for accuracy.
Squaring it with a politics that insists on the validity of scientific viewpoints inconsistent with rigorously reviewed, well-accepted research is another matter.
Amanda Wurst, Mr. Strickland's spokeswoman, said that the governor and his staff always rigorously reviewed clemency requests and that he had made no decision in the case.
An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Susan Bro, said, "Every issue or question raised during the Ketek review process and subsequently since approval has been rigorously reviewed by the nation's best physicians, statisticians and epidemiologists both internal and external to the F.D.A".
Yes, there are always exceptions; a great paper could be published in a journal that has a poor review process, and occasionally lousy papers manage to filter through to the rigorously reviewed journals.
Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, argues that his readers want information "that is highly meritorious and rigorously reviewed so that they don't make patient treatment decisions based on premature findings".
