0000000001031967
AUTHOR
Giangiacomo Bravo
Unlock ways to share data on peer review
Peer review is the defining feature of scholarly communication. In a 2018 survey of more than 11, 000 researchers, 98% said that they considered peer review important or extremely important for ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly communication.
Hidden connections: Network effects on editorial decisions in four computer science journals
Abstract This paper aims to examine the influence of authors’ reputation on editorial bias in scholarly journals. By looking at eight years of editorial decisions in four computer science journals, including 7179 observations on 2913 submissions, we reconstructed author/referee-submission networks. For each submission, we looked at reviewer scores and estimated the reputation of submission authors by means of their network degree. By training a Bayesian network, we estimated the potential effect of scientist reputation on editorial decisions. Results showed that more reputed authors were less likely to be rejected by editors when they submitted papers receiving negative reviews. Although th…
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 recommend…
No Tickets for Women in the COVID-19 Race? A Study on Manuscript Submissions and Reviews in 2347 Elsevier Journals during the Pandemic
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the submission rate to scholarly journals increased abnormally. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties might have penalised 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 younger cohorts of women academics. The rate of the peer-rev…
The peer review game: an agent-based model of scientists facing resource constraints and institutional pressures
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. We assumed that scientists were sensitive to acceptance or rejection of their manuscripts and the fairness of peer review to which they were exposed before reviewing. We also assumed that they could be realistic or excessively over-confident about the quality of their manuscripts when reviewing. Furthermore, we assumed they could be sensitive to competitive pressures provided by the ins…