Can editors protect peer review from bad reviewers?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ethical Issues, Science Policy
- Keywords
- Peer review, Referees, Rational cheating, Quality of publications, Journal editors, Referee behavior
- Copyright
- © 2017 D'Andrea et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Can editors protect peer review from bad reviewers? PeerJ Preprints 5:e3005v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3005v3
Abstract
Peer review is the gold standard for scientific communication, but its ability to guarantee the quality of published research remains difficult to verify. Recent modeling studies suggest that peer review is sensitive to reviewer misbehavior, and it has been claimed that referees who sabotage work they perceive as competition may severely undermine the quality of publications. Here we examine which aspects of suboptimal reviewing practices most strongly impact quality, and test different mitigating strategies that editors may employ to counter them. We find that the biggest hazard to the quality of published literature is not selfish rejection of high-quality manuscripts but indifferent acceptance of low-quality ones. Blacklisting bad reviewers and consulting additional reviewers to settle disagreements can reduce but not eliminate the impact. The other editorial strategies we tested do not significantly improve quality, but pairing manuscripts to reviewers unlikely to selfishly reject them and allowing revision of rejected manuscripts minimize rejection of above-average manuscripts. In its current form, peer review offers few incentives for impartial reviewing efforts. Editors can help, but structural changes are more likely to have a stronger impact.
Author Comment
Substituted the phrase "disinterested referee" with "impartial referee" to avoid confusion in meaning. Relocated table and figures from the end of the document to inside the text.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary Information
We derive the probability that a referee is selfish based on their record of reviews and disagreements.