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    • br In an age when everything

    2019-04-26


    In an age when everything from sparrows to toilets has its own international day (March 20 and November 19, respectively, in case you were wondering), it\'s perhaps no surprise that the scholarly publishing igf 1 inhibitor has got in on the act. This week is . Organised by representatives from publishers, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Sense about Science, ORCID (the organisation that provides authors with unique digital identifiers), and others, the week\'s aim is “celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality”. Quality is particularly essential for a “high impact” journal such as . Readers expect the papers we publish to be novel, robust, definitive, and generalisable—a tall order, of course, and one that needs a great deal of expertise to identify. All articles chosen for peer review are therefore sent to at least four reviewers—three subject or regional experts and one statistician. These experts are selected individually for each paper on the basis of the editor\'s own knowledge of the researchers active in the field as well as a bespoke literature review. The reviewers we recruit are therefore generally at the top of their field and provide us with an extensive critical appraisal that can go on for several pages. Sometimes they perform a second review of the revised paper. Sometimes they also write Comment pieces to accompany the research article when it is published. In short, our reviewers are an integral part of the journal, and we are taking the opportunity Peer Review Week affords to publicly acknowledge and sincerely thank all those who reviewed for us over the past 12 months (). These reviewers will also receive a small token of appreciation at the end of the year. I am a member of Council of COPE. Peer Review Week is supported by Elsevier, which publishes .
    Various global health estimates, including cause-specific mortality rates, have acquired prominence in recent years. Different sources use varying approaches, and competition may be healthy, possibly leading to a grand convergence in understanding. However, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), estimates frequently rely on minimal available data, which means that external validity is hard to demonstrate. Explicit connections between grass roots data and large-scale modelling are not always clear. The INDEPTH Network is an umbrella organisation for a number of health and demographic surveillance centres in Africa and Asia. At each location a geographically defined population is followed longitudinally and individual life events registered. This is an important source of information for countries that do not have functional civil registration and vital statistics systems. Deaths are followed up using verbal autopsy procedures (structured interviews with witnesses of the death, processed into cause-of-death information). INDEPTH has published a dataset covering over 100 000 individual deaths across Africa and Asia, but has difficulties in establishing external validity beyond its defined populations. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project has contributed substantially to global health in recent years by systematically generating estimates of cause-specific mortality over time and place. Nevertheless, GBD has not been able to demonstrate the external validity of these estimates, partly because its complex modelling approach has sought to include all available data sources as inputs, leading to a scarcity of independent comparators. This lack of external validation is a particular problem in LMICs, where data are generally very sparse. Since GBD 2013 specifically excluded INDEPTH cause of death data as inputs, an opportunity for independent co-validation arises. Both the GBD and INDEPTH approaches follow very complex and different pathways, starting from deaths in particular countries and ending with country estimates of cause-specific mortality; methods used here to compare these two sources are detailed in the . The aim here is to present a systematic co-validation between the GBD and INDEPTH cause-specific mortality findings for the 13 LMICs in both datasets, covering over a quarter of the world\'s population, during a 15-year period from 1998 to 2012.