I saw a few opinions about the 50 or so 'authors' for the JPAD paper with an incorrect understanding of the process. The vast majority of the 50 are site Principal investigators and not authors in the typical sense. Whenever you see a long list from a clinical trial paper, look at the first couple and last couple -- they actually played the larger role in writing the paper. Sabbagh is senior author. Macfarlane and Grimmer are the only other non-Anavex non-contracted authors who would have had significant input into the final paper. Teo down to Cohen are a list of PI's -- Australia followed by UK, Netherlands, Germany, Canada -- you can also see their sites on the clinicaltrials.gov listing. A couple people are also from Qynapse the imaging contractor. When there are more than 10-20 PI's often the PI's who had less role in the paper are not individually listed but will be included as authors with a 'name' like Attention-AD study group' and listed in the supplement. Anavex wrote the vast majority of the paper and it was refined by Macfarlane, Grimmer and Sabbagh. For the others, the 'author' role was running a clean site, recruiting patients and following the protocol. Often, the final paper is distributed in advance to the mass authors and they are asked to comment or suggest changes with a couple day turnaround time that may or may not be incorporated.
Once submitted to a journal, the editor or section editor will read (sometimes skim)the paper. If it is clearly deficient, they have the ability to immediately turn the paper down. If they feel it passes a certain threshold (which is of course different depending on the quality and reach of a journal) they then assign the paper to 2 peer-reviewers. They are usually asked to quickly review as in one week (and if unable to do in a timely manner will politely decline and another peer is chosen). They will spend abput 2-3 hours reviewing the paper and making comments. They do not look at the promary data but just the information provided by the authors. Only highest tier papers like NEJM also have a statistical reviewer make comments. Reviewers can say Accept (usually with minor revisions that just take a couple hours to satisfy), Accept with major revisions (not also possible to do or may require a major re-analysis - thus often authors will resubmit elsewhere) or decline outright. If one reviewer accept and one declines, a third tie-break reviewer or the editor will review the paper for best 2 out of 3.
As I suspected, Missling chose a mid tier journal that would not require publication of the Statistical Analysis Plan as top tier journals would do. Funny, no mention of Odds Ratio or t-tests in the paper.
AI
