Structured peer review: pilot results from 23 Elsevier journals.

Background: Reviewers rarely comment on the same aspects of a manuscript, making it difficult to properly assess manuscripts' quality and the quality of the peer review process. The goal of this pilot study was to evaluate structured peer review implementation by: 1) exploring whether and how reviewers answered structured peer review questions, 2) analysing reviewer agreement, 3) comparing that agreement to agreement before implementation of structured peer review, and 4) further enhancing the piloted set of structured peer review questions. Methods: Structured peer review consisting of nine questions was piloted in August 2022 in 220 Elsevier journals. We randomly selected 10% of these journals across all fields and IF quartiles and included manuscripts that received two review reports in the first 2 months of the pilot, leaving us with 107 manuscripts belonging to 23 journals. Eight questions had open-ended fields, while the ninth question (on language editing) had only a yes/no option. The reviews could also leave Comments-to-Author and Comments-to-Editor. Answers were independently analysed by two raters, using qualitative methods. Results: Almost all the reviewers (n = 196, 92%) provided answers to all questions even though these questions were not mandatory in the system. The longest answer (Md 27 words, IQR 11 to 68) was for reporting methods with sufficient details for replicability or reproducibility. The reviewers had the highest (partial) agreement (of 72%) for assessing the flow and structure of the manuscript, and the lowest (of 53%) for assessing whether interpretation of the results was supported by data, and for assessing whether the statistical analyses were appropriate and reported in sufficient detail (52%). Two thirds of the reviewers (n = 145, 68%) filled out the Comments-to-Author section, of which 105 (49%) resembled traditional peer review reports. These reports contained a Md of 4 (IQR 3 to 5) topics covered by the structured questions. Absolute agreement regarding final recommendations (exact match of recommendation choice) was 41%, which was higher than what those journals had in the period from 2019 to 2021 (31% agreement, P = 0.0275). Conclusions: Our preliminary results indicate that reviewers successfully adapted to the new review format, and that they covered more topics than in their traditional reports. Individual question analysis indicated the greatest disagreement regarding the interpretation of the results and the conducting and the reporting of statistical analyses. While structured peer review did lead to improvement in reviewer final recommendation agreements, this was not a randomized trial, and further studies should be performed to corroborate this. Further research is also needed to determine whether structured peer review leads to greater knowledge transfer or better improvement of manuscripts.

Measuring the developmental function of peer review: a multi-dimensional, cross-disciplinary analysis of peer review reports from 740 academic journals.

Reviewers do not only help editors to screen manuscripts for publication in academic journals; they also serve to increase the rigor and value of manuscripts by constructive feedback. However, measuring this developmental function of peer review is difficult as it requires fine-grained data on reports and journals without any optimal benchmark. To fill this gap, we adapted a recently proposed quality assessment tool and tested it on a sample of 1.3 million reports submitted to 740 Elsevier journals in 2018-2020. Results showed that the developmental standards of peer review are shared across areas of research, yet with remarkable differences. Reports submitted to social science and economics journals show the highest developmental standards. Reports from junior reviewers, women and reviewers from Western Europe are generally more developmental than those from senior, men and reviewers working in academic institutions outside Western regions. Our findings suggest that increasing the standards of peer review at journals requires effort to assess interventions and measure practices with context-specific and multi-dimensional frameworks.

Gender gap in journal submissions and peer review during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study on 2329 Elsevier journals.

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an unusually high submission rate of scholarly articles. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties may have penalized the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review activities for all Elsevier journals between February and May 2018-2020, including data on over 5 million authors and referees. Results showed that during the first wave of the pandemic, women submitted proportionally fewer manuscripts than men. This deficit was especially pronounced among more junior cohorts of women academics. The rate of the peer-review invitation acceptance showed a less pronounced gender pattern with women taking on a greater service responsibility for journals, except for health & medicine, the field where the impact of COVID-19 research has been more prominent. Our findings suggest that the first wave of the pandemic has created potentially cumulative advantages for men.

Peer review and gender bias: A study on 145 scholarly journals.

Scholarly journals are often blamed for a gender gap in publication rates, but it is unclear whether peer review and editorial processes contribute to it. This article examines gender bias in peer review with data for 145 journals in various fields of research, including about 1.7 million authors and 740,000 referees. We reconstructed three possible sources of bias, i.e., the editorial selection of referees, referee recommendations, and editorial decisions, and examined all their possible relationships. Results showed that manuscripts written by women as solo authors or coauthored by women were treated even more favorably by referees and editors. Although there were some differences between fields of research, our findings suggest that peer review and editorial processes do not penalize manuscripts by women. However, increasing gender diversity in editorial teams and referee pools could help journals inform potential authors about their attention to these factors and so stimulate participation by women.

The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals.

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals are publishing peer review reports. But it is unclear how this practice affects the peer review process. Here, we examine the effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals involved in a pilot study at Elsevier. By considering 9,220 submissions and 18,525 reviews from 2010 to 2017, we measured changes both before and during the pilot and found that publishing reports did not significantly compromise referees' willingness to review, recommendations, or turn-around times. Younger and non-academic scholars were more willing to accept to review and provided more positive and objective recommendations. Male referees tended to write more constructive reports during the pilot. Only 8.1% of referees agreed to reveal their identity in the published report. These findings suggest that open peer review does not compromise the process, at least when referees are able to protect their anonymity.