A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study.

After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.  The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more…

Double-blind review is somewhat more effective compared to single-blind.

The Kostoff knowledge v.8 Earlier this month, Elsevier’s Toxicology Reports (CiteScore 6.2, top quartile) published a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic.  Its includes a remarkable articl…

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak as part of a workshop held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). A NECS working group had dra…

Ivan Oransky: Not a COVID-19 expertcredit: Elizabeth Solaka At the risk of breaking the Fourth Wall, here’s a story about peer reviews that weren’t — and shouldn’t have been. Since mid-Februa…

Academic journals provide a key quality-control mechanism in science. Yet, information asymmetries and conflicts of interests incentivize scientists to deceive journals about the quality of their research. How can honesty be ensured, despite incentives for deception? Here, we address this question by applying the theory of honest signaling to the publication process. Our models demonstrate that several mechanisms can ensure honest journal submission, including differential benefits, differential costs, and costs to resubmitting rejected papers. Without submission costs, scientists benefit from submitting all papers to high-ranking journals, unless papers can only be submitted a limited number of times. Counterintuitively, our analysis implies that inefficiencies in academic publishing (e.g., arbitrary formatting requirements, long review times) can serve a function by disincentivizing scientists from submitting low-quality work to high-ranking journals. Our models provide simple, powerful tools for understanding how to promote honest paper submission in academic publishing.

Opinion | A flourishing of Covid-19 literature dispels the idea that pre-publication peer review is essential for academic rigor.

What steps can scholarly journal publishers take to foster greater trust in the peer review process? In this post, we round up four ways that increasing transparency in peer review individually and collectively can help.

Background The process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown. Methods We evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages. Results Overall, 12% (179) of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% (611) contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques (IIUC). Conclusions The large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review.

Nature - When a handful of authors were caught reviewing their own papers, it exposed weaknesses in modern publishing systems. Editors are trying to plug the holes.

Researchers of color particularly vulnerable to “unprofessional” comments

An experiment with 243 young communication scholars tested hypotheses derived from role congruity theory regarding impacts of author gender and gender typing of...

Nature - The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.