In the past decades, many countries have started to fund academic institutions based on the evaluation of their scientific performance. In this context, post-publication peer review is often used to assess scientific performance. Bibliometric indicators have been suggested as an alternative to peer review. A recurrent question in this context is whether peer review and metrics tend to yield similar outcomes. In this paper, we study the agreement between bibliometric indicators and peer review based on a sample of publications submitted for evaluation to the national Italian research assessment exercise (2011--2014). In particular, we study the agreement between bibliometric indicators and peer review at a higher aggregation level, namely the institutional level. Additionally, we also quantify the internal agreement of peer review at the institutional level. We base our analysis on a hierarchical Bayesian model using cross-validation. We find that the level of agreement is generally higher at the institutional level than at the publication level. Overall, the agreement between metrics and peer review is on par with the internal agreement among two reviewers for certain fields of science in this particular context. This suggests that for some fields, bibliometric indicators may possibly be considered as an alternative to peer review for the Italian national research assessment exercise. Although results do not necessarily generalise to other contexts, it does raise the question whether similar findings would obtain for other research assessment exercises, such as in the United Kingdom.
Systematic evaluations of publicly funded research typically employ a combination of bibliometrics and peer review, but it is not known whether the bibliometric component introduces biases. This article compares three alternative mechanisms for scoring 73,612 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) journal articles from all 34 field-based Units of Assessment (UoAs) 2014-17: peer review, field normalised citations, and journal average field normalised citation impact. All three were standardised into a four-point scale. The results suggest that in almost all academic fields, bibliometric scoring…
Most Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) draw on peer review and bibliometric indicators, two different methodologies which are sometimes combined. A common argument against the use of indicators in such research evaluation exercises is their low correlation at the article level with peer review judgments. In this study, we analyse 191,000 papers from 154 higher education institutes which were peer reviewed in a national research evaluation exercise. We combine these data with 6.95 million citations to the original papers. We show that when citation-based indicators are applied a…
Since a number of journals specifically focus on the review and publication of data sets, reviewing their policies seems an appropriate place to start in assessing what existing practice looks like in the 'real world' of reviewing and publishing data. This article outlines a study of the publicly available peer review policies of 39 scientific publications that publish data papers to discern which criteria are most and least frequently referenced. It also compares current practice with proposed criteria published in 2012.
In computer science, conferences and journals conduct peer review in order to decide what to publish. Many have pointed out the inherent weaknesses in peer review, including those of bias, quality, and accountability. Many have suggested and adopted refinements of peer review, for instance, double blind peer review with author rebuttals. In this essay, I argue that peer review as currently practiced conflates the sensible idea of getting comments on a paper with the irrevocably-flawed one that we either accept or reject the paper, which I term gatekeeping. If we look at the two separately, the…
A question often asked by authors is how long would it take for the peer review process. Peer review duration has been concerned much by authors and attracted much attention in academia these years. Existing research on this field focuses primarily on a single quantitative dimension. Seldom studies considered that peer review duration is closely related to the attractiveness of manuscripts. This study aims to fill this research gap employing attention economy theory. By analyzing the peer review history from the British Medical Journal (BMJ), we find that a significant negative relationship ex…
Comments received from referees during peer-review were analysed to determine the rates of duplication and partial duplication. It is very unusual for 2 different referees to submit identical comments, so the rare cases where this happens are of interest. In some cases, it appears that paper-mills create fake referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports. These include comments that are copied and pasted across multiple reviews. Searching for duplication in referee comments is therefore an effective method to search for misconduct generally, since the forms of misconduct com…
When performing a national research assessment, some countries rely on citation metrics whereas others, such as the UK, primarily use peer review. In the influential Metric Tide report, a low agreement between metrics and peer review in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) was found. However, earlier studies observed much higher agreement between metrics and peer review in the REF and argued in favour of using metrics. This shows that there is considerable ambiguity in the discussion on agreement between metrics and peer review. We provide clarity in this discussion by considering four i…
The peer review system as used in several computer science communities has several flaws including long review times, overloaded reviewers, as well as fostering of niche topics. These flaws decrease quality, lower impact, slowdown the innovation process, and lead to frustration of authors, readers, and reviewers. In order to fix this, we propose a new peer review system termed paper bricks. Paper bricks has several advantages over the existing system including shorter publications, better competition for new ideas, as well as an accelerated innovation process. Furthermore, paper bricks may be …
This study examines whether there is any evidence of bias in two areas of common critique of open, non-anonymous peer review - and used in the post-publication, peer review system operated by the open-access scholarly publishing platform F1000Research. First, is there evidence of bias where a reviewer based in a specific country assesses the work of an author also based in the same country? Second, are reviewers influenced by being able to see the comments and know the origins of previous reviewer? Methods: Scrutinising the open peer review comments published on F1000Research, we assess the ex…
Development of bibliometric techniques has reached such a level as to suggest their integration or total substitution for classic peer review in the national research assessment exercises, as far as the hard sciences are concerned. In this work we compare rankings lists of universities captured by the first Italian evaluation exercise, through peer review, with the results of bibliometric simulations. The comparison shows the great differences between peer review and bibliometric rankings for excellence and productivity.
National research assessment exercises are becoming regular events in ever more countries. The present work contrasts the peer-review and bibliometrics approaches in the conduct of these exercises. The comparison is conducted in terms of the essential parameters of any measurement system: accuracy, robustness, validity, functionality, time and costs. Empirical evidence shows that for the natural and formal sciences, the bibliometric methodology is by far preferable to peer-review. Setting up national databases of publications by individual authors, derived from Web of Science or Scopus databas…
Peer review aims to detect flaws and deficiencies in the design and interpretation of studies, and ensure the clarity and quality of their presentation. However, it has been questioned whether peer review fulfils this function. Studies have highlighted a stronger focus of reviewers on critiquing methodological aspects of studies and the quality of writing in biomedical sciences, with less focus on theoretical grounding. In contrast, reviewers in the social sciences appear more concerned with theoretical underpinnings. These studies also found the effect of peer review on manuscripts' content t…
In this work, we try to answer the question of which method, peer review vs bibliometrics, better predicts the future overall scholarly impact of scientific publications. We measure the agreement between peer review evaluations of Web of Science indexed publications submitted to the first Italian research assessment exercise and long-term citations of the same publications. We do the same for an early citation-based indicator. We find that the latter shows stronger predictive power, i.e., it more reliably predicts late citations in all the disciplinary areas examined, and for any citation time…
In this paper peer review reliability is investigated based on peer ratings of research teams at two Belgian universities. It is found that outcomes can be substantially influenced by the different ways in which experts attribute ratings. To increase reliability of peer ratings, procedures creating a uniform reference level should be envisaged. One should at least check for signs of low reliability, which can be obtained from an analysis of the outcomes of the peer evaluation itself. The peer review results are compared to outcomes from a citation analysis of publications by the same teams, in…
The objective of the OSCOSS research project on "Opening Scholarly Communication in the Social Sciences" is to build a coherent collaboration environment that facilitates scholarly communication workflows of social scientists in the roles of authors, reviewers, editors and readers. This paper presents the implementation of the core of this environment: the integration of the Fidus Writer academic word processor with the Open Journal Systems (OJS) submission and review management system.
There has been ample demonstration that bibliometrics is superior to peer-review for national research assessment exercises in the hard sciences. In this paper we examine the Italian case, taking the 2001-2003 university performance rankings list based on bibliometrics as benchmark. We compare the accuracy of the first national evaluation exercise, conducted entirely by peer-review, to other rankings lists prepared at zero cost, based on indicators indirectly linked to performance or available on the Internet. The results show that, for the hard sciences, the costs of conducting the Italian ev…
Peer review is the backbone of modern science. F1000Prime is a post-publication peer review system of the biomedical literature (papers from medical and biological journals). This study is concerned with the inter-rater reliability and convergent validity of the peer recommendations formulated in the F1000Prime peer review system. The study is based on around 100,000 papers with recommendations from Faculty members. Even if intersubjectivity plays a fundamental role in science, the analyses of the reliability of the F1000Prime peer review system show a rather low level of agreement between Fac…
We examine selected aspects of peer review and suggest possible improvements. To this end, we analyse a dataset containing information about 300 papers submitted to the Biochemistry and Biotechnology section of the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society. After separating the peer review process into stages that each review has to go through, we use a weighted directed graph to describe it in a probabilistic manner and test the impact of some modifications of the editorial policy on the efficiency of the whole process.
Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from forecasting assessment to examine how two modes of peer review -- ex ante review of proposals for future work and ex post review of completed science -- motivate scientists to favor some questions instead of others. Our main result is that ex ante and ex post peer review push investigators toward distinct sets of scientific questions. This tension arises be…
Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contribution set forth by this paper emphasizes a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an OAI-PMH peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighti…
Peer review is a process designed to produce a fair assessment of research quality before the publication of scholarly work in a journal. Demographics, nepotism, and seniority have been all shown to affect reviewer behavior suggesting the most common, single-blind review method (or the less common open review method) might be biased. A survey of current research indicates that double-blind review offers a solution to many biases stemming from author's gender, seniority, or location without imposing any significant downsides.
For improving the performance and effectiveness of peer review, a novel review system is proposed, based on analysis of peer review process for academic journals under a parallel model built via Monte Carlo method. The model can simulate the review, application and acceptance activities of the review systems, in a distributed manner. According to simulation experiments on two distinct review systems respectively, significant advantages manifest for the novel one.
The paper describes a potential platform to facilitate academic peer review with emphasis on early-stage research. This platform aims to make peer review more accurate and timely by rewarding reviewers on the basis of peer prediction algorithms. The algorithm uses a variation of Peer Truth Serum for Crowdsourcing (Radanovic et al., 2016) with human raters competing against a machine learning benchmark. We explain how our approach addresses two large productive inefficiencies in science: mismatch between research questions and publication bias. Better peer review for early research creates addi…
The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We discuss here a few possible improvements that would enable more efficient review of the scientific literature, using the growing Internet connectivity. In particular, a practical automated model for providing the referees with references to papers that might have strong relationship with the work under review, based on general network properties of citations …
This dissertation is focused on the role of objectivity in peer review. Through an examination of aspects of peer review including anonymity, trust, expertise, and the question of who has standing to evaluate research, we find that objectivity in peer review differs significantly from other uses of the term objectivity in science. In peer review it is not required for this objectivity to have correspondence to an outside world, instead it is enough for it to operate inside the "rules" of the community. Neither is the objectivity here empirical in the sense of using data about the scientific pr…
This paper aims to gain a better understanding of the perspectives of contributors to Spanish academic journals regarding open access, open peer review, and altmetrics. It also explores how age, gender, professional experience, career history, and perception and use of social media influence authors opinions toward these developments in scholarly publishing. A sample of contributors (n-1254) to Spanish academic journals was invited to participate in a survey about the aforementioned topics. The response rate was 24 per cent (n-295). Contributors to Spanish scholarly journals hold a favourable …
Peer-review system has long been relied upon for bringing quality research to the notice of the scientific community and also preventing flawed research from entering into the literature. The need for the peer-review system has often been debated as in numerous cases it has failed in its task and in most of these cases editors and the reviewers were thought to be responsible for not being able to correctly judge the quality of the work. This raises a question "Can the peer-review system be improved?" Since editors and reviewers are the most important pillars of a reviewing system, we in this w…
The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees' work patterns and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large number of concurrent ones - a Deadline -effect…
Peer review is widely regarded as essential for advancing scientific research. However, reviewers may be biased by authors' prestige or other characteristics. Double-blind peer review, in which the authors' identities are masked from the reviewers, has been proposed as a way to reduce reviewer bias. Although intuitive, evidence for the effectiveness of double-blind peer review in reducing bias is limited and mixed. Here, we examine the effects of double-blind peer review on prestige bias by analyzing the peer review files of 5027 papers submitted to the International Conference on Learning Rep…
This is a Commentary in $Physics~Today$ on the novel review process developed by the biology journal $eLife$, with the suggestion that it be adopted by physics journals.
Peer review is a cornerstone of modern scientific endeavor. However, there is growing consensus that several limitations of the current peer review system, from lack of incentives to reviewers to lack of transparency, risks to undermine its benefits. Here, we introduce the PRINCIPIA (http://www.principia.network/) framework for peer-review of scientific outputs (e.g., papers, grant proposals or patents). The framework allows key players of the scientific ecosystem -- including existing publishing groups -- to create and manage peer-reviewed journals, by building a free market for reviews and p…
An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these. Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed. This approach pr…
A simulation model based on parallel systems is established, aiming to explore the relation between the number of submissions and the overall standard of academic journals within a similar discipline under peer review. The model can effectively simulate the submission, review, and acceptance behaviors of academic journals in a distributed manner. According to the simulation experiments, it could possibly happen that the overall standard of academic journals deteriorates due to excessive submissions.
In post-publication peer review, scientific contributions are first published in open-access forums, such as arXiv or other digital libraries, and are subsequently reviewed and possibly ranked and/or evaluated. Compared to the classical process of scientific publishing, in which review precedes publication, post-publication peer review leads to faster dissemination of ideas, and publicly-available reviews. The chief concern in post-publication reviewing consists in eliciting high-quality, insightful reviews from participants. We describe the mathematical foundations and structure of TrueReview…
This article shows why the diffusion and peer-reviewing of research results would be more efficient, precise and relevant if all or at least some parts of the descriptions and peer-reviews of research results took the form of a fine-grained semantic network, within articles or knowledge bases, as part of the Semantic Web. This article also shows some ways this can be done and hence how research journal/proceeding publishers could allow this. So far, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has not proposed simple notations and cooperation protocols - similar to those illustrated or referred to in t…
Pre-review to Peer review: Pitfalls of Automating Reviews using Large Language Models
AllSci Corp（AllSci公司）；Sunwater Capital（Sunwater资本）；Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University（西北大学凯洛格管理学院）；Dept. of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University（北伊利诺伊大学计算机科学系）；Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI（基础模型研究所，MBZUAI）
The number of scientific publications is constantly rising, increasing the strain on the review process. The number of submissions is actually higher, as each manuscript is often reviewed several times before publication. To face the deluge of submissions, top journals reject a considerable fraction of manuscripts without review, potentially declining manuscripts with merit. The situation is frustrating for authors, reviewers and editors alike. Recently, several editors wrote about the ``tragedy of the reviewer commons', advocating for urgent corrections to the system. Almost every scientist h…
Context: Pre-publication peer review of scientific articles is considered a key element of the research process in software engineering, yet it is often perceived as not to work fully well. Objective: We aim at understanding the perceptions of and attitudes towards peer review of authors and reviewers at one of software engineering's most prestigious venues, the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Method: We invited 932 ICSE 2014/15/16 authors and reviewers to participate in a survey with 10 closed and 9 open questions. Results: We present a multitude of results, such as: …
MOPRD: A multidisciplinary open peer review dataset
School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Key Laboratory of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian and Taiwan, Ministry of Culture and Tourism（文化和旅游部闽台非物质文化遗产数字化保护与智能处理重点实验室）；College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University（厦门大学外文学院）
Peer-review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher. Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality, and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that rewards scientists for peer-reviewing other scientists' work and that buil…
The peer-review process is the most widely accepted certification mechanism for officially accepting the written results of researchers within the scientific community. An essential component of peer-review is the identification of competent referees to review a submitted manuscript. This article presents an algorithm to automatically determine the most appropriate reviewers for a manuscript by way of a co-authorship network data structure and a relative-rank particle-swarm algorithm. This approach is novel in that it is not limited to a pre-selected set of referees, is computationally efficie…
FMMD: A multimodal multidisciplinary dataset of open peer reviews from F1000Research
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Guangzhou Institute of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，广州科学与技术研究所）；College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University（外语学院，厦门大学）；Science and Education Evaluation Lab, Guangzhou Institute of Science and Technology（科学与教育评估实验室，广州科学与技术研究所）
