ScienceGeist

Identification and synthetisation of studies that examine grant peer review criteria in an empirical and inductive manner.

A study of the use of curricula vitae for competitive funding decisions in science suggests that bibliographic categories such as authorship of publications or performance metrics may themselves come to be problematized and reshaped in the process.

As flaws in the peer review process are highlighted and calls for reform become more frequent, it may be tempting for some to denigrate and dismiss the contributions of the reviewers themselves.

Targeting a general audience, this opinion piece argues that with more transparency about the publication process, we might have a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is built - and fewer people taking “peer-reviewed” to mean settled truth.

Authors want their papers published quickly while also expecting high-quality reviews. Reviewers want reasonable deadlines. These two groups come from the same communities so why the disconnect? 

Measurement creates a temptation to achieve a measurable goal by less than totally honest means. As in physics, the simple act of measuring invariably disturbs what you are trying to measure.

Reviewers can now enter their ORCID iD in the Editorial Manager submission system for all PLOS journals and opt-in to automatically get credit when they complete a review, the same way they would for their published articles.

The fifth annual Peer Review Week will take place from September 16-20, 2019. This post reflects on its history and achievements. 

ASAPbio launched Transpose, a database of journal peer review, co-reviewing, and preprint policies relating to media coverage, licensing, versions, and citation.

The purpose of peer review is often portrayed as being a simple ‘objective’ test of the soundness or quality of a research paper. However, it also performs other functions primarily through linking and developing relationships between networks of researchers. 

If the system is adopted, reviewers and applicants will be anonymous, in an attempt to make selection fairer.

The country's major funding agency says the tool reduces the time it takes to find referees.

Registered Reports emphasize the importance of the research question and the quality of methodology by conducting peer review prior to data collection. High quality protocols are then provisionally accepted for publication if the authors follow through with the registered methodology.

Our Taken for Granted columnist discusses a new report about the practice-and recommendations for reform.

The development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication.

A new survey reveals the alarming extent of a practice that is universally considered unethical.

Swiss funding agency banned applicant-nominated referees after a 2016 study found evidence of bias. Those results are now being made public.

Thousands of Nature referees have chosen to be publicly acknowledged.

This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing.

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS- The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers.

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness.

Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society.

This paper investigates the impact of referee reliability on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modeled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias.

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. Thi…

This paper presents an index that measures reviewer contribution to editorial processes of scholarly journals. Following a metaphor of ranking algorit…

Paper finds that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on their reviewing tasks.  Articles that had been recommended by a multidisciplinary set of referees were found to receive subsequently more citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline.

By forming a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then selecting randomly within that pool, funding agencies could avoid biases, disagreement and other limitations of peer review.

A review of the challenges and lessons learned in managing the development of Libero Reviewer.