In 2024, AOL reviewers continue to make outstanding contributions to the peer review process. They demonstrated professional effort and enthusiasm in their reviews and provided comments that genuinely help the authors to enhance their work.
Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding reviewers, with a brief interview of their thoughts and insights as a reviewer. Allow us to express our heartfelt gratitude for their tremendous effort and valuable contributions to the scientific process.
January, 2024
Dai Chihara, MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA
January, 2024
Dai Chihara
Dai Chihara, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX USA. He received his MD degree from Kobe University and completed residency, fellowships in hematology and oncology both in Japan and the United States. Dr. Chihara focuses on clinical research of lymphoma from outcomes research to clinical trials with a particular focus on aggressive and indolent B-cell lymphomas. He has led multiple research projects utilizing clinical data and population-based cancer registry data to identify high-risk populations with poor outcomes. He is currently working on development of experimental therapeutics and discovering novel trial design and biomarkers in lymphoma through investigator-initiated clinical trials at MD Anderson Cancer Center to address unmet needs for patients. Dr. Chihara has received many awards including ones from American Society of Hematology and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
According to Dr. Chihara, the peer-review process is critical to ensure that papers are published after objective review to evaluate the validity, significance and originality of the study. Through the process, authors can improve the quality of the final manuscript.
“Reviewing is a volunteered effort from researchers in the field and the process is time consuming, and thus it is hard to find reviewers,” says Dr. Chihara when he is asked about the limitation of the existing peer-review system. In his opinion, the system relies on good faith from researchers and the increasing amount of work due to rapid progress in medicine has become overwhelming. Also, the explosion of papers in online journals has likely led to mass production of low-quality papers with little peer review, becoming challenging to maintain scientific integrity. As some journals have started to do so, keeping track of the peer-review effort recognized academically can potentially help.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
