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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing

Peer review is an important element of scientific communication but deserves quantitative examination. We used data from the handling service manuscript Central for ten mid-tier ecology and evolution journals to test whether number of external reviews completed improved citation rates for all accept...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Lortie, Christopher J., Allesina, Stefano, Aarssen, Lonnie, Grod, Olyana, Budden, Amber E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3875543/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24386471
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085382
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author Lortie, Christopher J.
Allesina, Stefano
Aarssen, Lonnie
Grod, Olyana
Budden, Amber E.
author_facet Lortie, Christopher J.
Allesina, Stefano
Aarssen, Lonnie
Grod, Olyana
Budden, Amber E.
author_sort Lortie, Christopher J.
collection PubMed
description Peer review is an important element of scientific communication but deserves quantitative examination. We used data from the handling service manuscript Central for ten mid-tier ecology and evolution journals to test whether number of external reviews completed improved citation rates for all accepted manuscripts. Contrary to a previous study examining this issue using resubmission data as a proxy for reviews, we show that citation rates of manuscripts do not correlate with the number of individuals that provided reviews. Importantly, externally-reviewed papers do not outperform editor-only reviewed published papers in terms of visibility within a 5-year citation window. These findings suggest that in many instances editors can be all that is needed to review papers (or at least conduct the critical first review to assess general suitability) if the purpose of peer review is to primarily filter and that journals can consider reducing the number of referees associated with reviewing ecology and evolution papers.
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spelling pubmed-38755432014-01-02 With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing Lortie, Christopher J. Allesina, Stefano Aarssen, Lonnie Grod, Olyana Budden, Amber E. PLoS One Research Article Peer review is an important element of scientific communication but deserves quantitative examination. We used data from the handling service manuscript Central for ten mid-tier ecology and evolution journals to test whether number of external reviews completed improved citation rates for all accepted manuscripts. Contrary to a previous study examining this issue using resubmission data as a proxy for reviews, we show that citation rates of manuscripts do not correlate with the number of individuals that provided reviews. Importantly, externally-reviewed papers do not outperform editor-only reviewed published papers in terms of visibility within a 5-year citation window. These findings suggest that in many instances editors can be all that is needed to review papers (or at least conduct the critical first review to assess general suitability) if the purpose of peer review is to primarily filter and that journals can consider reducing the number of referees associated with reviewing ecology and evolution papers. Public Library of Science 2013-12-30 /pmc/articles/PMC3875543/ /pubmed/24386471 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085382 Text en © 2013 Lortie et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Lortie, Christopher J.
Allesina, Stefano
Aarssen, Lonnie
Grod, Olyana
Budden, Amber E.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title_full With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title_fullStr With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title_full_unstemmed With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title_short With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing
title_sort with great power comes great responsibility: the importance of rejection, power, and editors in the practice of scientific publishing
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3875543/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24386471
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085382
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