Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in the Health Sciences and Related Medical Fields

This report marks the forth in the series of discipline-grouped evaluations of South African scholarly journals. Ultimately, it is intended that all scholarly journals in the country will have been subjected to independent, multiple peer review as part of a quality assurance process initiated by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The quality assurance process is a precursor to the identifi cation of journal titles to be loaded on to the open access platform, Scientifi c Electronic Library Online (SciELO) South Africa.
Only journals of a suffi ciently high quality will be included in this fully indexed, free online, multinational platform, now also to be directly featured on the Thomson-Reuters Web of Knowledge portal.
The traditional focus of peer review is on a single journal article, book chapter or book. It is less common to subject journals to independent, multiple peer review, as these are usually evaluated in qualitative, reputational terms, or, bibliometrically, by means of impact factors.
Peer review of South African scholarly journal titles thus required the development of a new methodology that was piloted successfully with the fi rst two discipline-grouped peer- review reports, published in 2010 on the Social Sciences and Related Fields, and the Agricultural and Related Basic Life Sciences.
This has not been achieved without diffi culty, as the process is unfamiliar to reviewers accustomed to reviewing single articles. In 2013, the Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in Religion, Theology and Related Fields was published.
ASSAf has confidence in this ambitious programme aimed at assuring that the bulk of South African scholarly journals is of a high quality. The process goes beyond the above-mentioned familiar journal assessment approaches by providing concrete recommendations to enable the editor(s) of journals not deemed to be of a suffi cient standard to take corrective action and to reapply for evaluation.