TY - JOUR T1 - Diversity: The Art of Reviewing Independently Together JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0350-18.2018 VL - 5 IS - 5 SP - ENEURO.0350-18.2018 AU - Christophe Bernard Y1 - 2018/09/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/5/5/ENEURO.0350-18.2018.abstract N2 - The theme of this Peer Review Week is diversity, and I paraphrase the original citation of M. Forbes, “Diversity: the art of thinking independently together,” because it says it all. In my last editorial, I addressed the issue of gender balance in the scientific publication process. I showed that eNeuro was gender-balanced, i.e., male and female last authors have a similar chance for their submitted paper to be accepted. The same result (gender balance) was found for first authors. I proposed that the double-blind review system was largely contributing to this success. Since the names of authors are not revealed to reviewers, they cannot, ideally, bias their evaluation on gender, country of origin, or reputation/status of the last author.However, in scientific journals, there is a potential bias that is not frequently taken into consideration, how reviewers are selected. When I acted as a Reviewing Editor for JNeurosci, I tried to choose the best reviewers for a given paper, i.e., those who provided excellent factual and fair reviews. I did not pay attention to gender or country of origin of reviewers. Yet, my selection was based on people I knew (and trusted), which I now acknowledge could have introduced a bias in itself; however, I was not cognizant of this potential bias at that time. I would hazard a guess that some of my fellow reviewing editors follow a similar process.The topic of this Peer Review Week led me to question the way I was doing it. When acting as authors, reviewers, or reviewing editors, we all notice how different … ER -