PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Felthous, Alan R.
AU  - Wettstein, Robert M.
AU  - Nassif, Jose
TI  - Bias in Peer Review of Forensic Psychiatry Publications
AID  - 10.29158/JAAPL.240090-24
DP  - 2025 Feb 11
TA  - Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online
PG  - JAAPL.240090-24
4099  - http://jaapl.org/content/early/2025/02/11/JAAPL.240090-24.short
4100  - http://jaapl.org/content/early/2025/02/11/JAAPL.240090-24.full
AB  - Bias can vitiate the quality and credibility of a mental health professional’s forensic evaluations as well as scientific and scholarly contributions to the forensic process in forensic psychiatry publications. Our attention here is on this latter influence of bias, although the genres of bias identified here can as well occur in forensic practice and writings. Attention is given to multiple forms of bias in peer review: ad hominem, ideological, confirmatory, hindsight, the halo effect, gender, publication, conflict of (financial) interest, political, religious, nationality or country of origin, esthetic or linguistic, racial or ethnicity, and herding. No doubt much bias in peer review goes undetected and no absolute purification process exists. Nonetheless, as with almost any problem, the first step toward a remedy is recognition.