Making a dissenting opinion

The Dissenting opinion feature allows Faculty members to present a more critical view on papers already selected on the Faculty of 1000 site that you feel should not have been selected, or where flaws should have pointed out but were not.

As one of the aims of Faculty of 1000 is to present a consensus view of interesting papers, we recognized the need to allow Faculty members to express their differing opinions on selected papers.

A 'Dissenting opinion' can be submitted only for papers already evaluated by another Faculty member. Once the Dissent is submitted, the editorial team will contact the original evaluating Faculty member(s) to see whether they would like to revise their evaluation in light of the Dissenting view. If not, then the Dissent will go live and the authors of the paper will be contacted and given the opportunity to write a brief response. In each case, the texts will remain brief and there will be no further responses published.

The aim is not to 'resolve' an issue but simply to bring to the reader's attention that opinion is divided: it will ultimately be their responsibility to read the literature and make their own decision. Nor is the purpose of a dissenting opinion to criticise another evaluation. Criticism should only be directed at an article rather than at a fellow faculty member. (If you think the paper warrants its evaluation but you want to make different points about its interpretation you can do this as part of a normal evaluation without referring directly to the other evaluation.)

To submit a Dissent, use the compose evaluation link or contact the editorial team editorial@f1000biology.com

Sample Pages

To see what a Dissent will look like on the live site, view a sample Evaluation page and then a sample Dissent page.

Entering paper details

Dissenting opinion can only be added to articles which already appear on the public F1000 site. This makes selecting the correct article much easier.

Enter the unique article PubMed ID (PMID)

The PMID will be the number in the URL of the article comments page on the public (purple) F1000 site.

For each selected paper, you will need to write a comment. This is exactly the same procedure as for a normal evaluation. You need to write 2-4 sentences explaining why you are dissenting over the inclusion of the article on F1000. Our aim is to make the first sentence intelligible to a wide biology readership and to have it convey your main point (this will appear in bold like the first sentence of a normal evaluation). The second sentence can provide more specialist information. Additional sentences are optional but please keep the comments brief.

Save to Draft evaluations

If you don't have time to complete the dissent process or want to simply save a draft, then you can move your draft dissenting opinion and complete it later. All drafts are saved in Draft Evaluations in My Evaluations.

My Evaluations

Dissents are treated as a type of evaluation, so appear along with normal evaluations in 'My Evaluations'. To help distinguish the two types we use the following:

signifies a dissent

signifies an evaluation