Author-suggested reviewers rate manuscripts much more favorably: A cross-sectional analysis of the neuroscience section of PLOS ONE

Peer review is an important part of science, aimed at providing expert and objective assessment of a manuscript. Because of many factors, including time constraints, unique expertise needs, and deference, many journals ask authors to suggest peer reviewers for their own manuscript. Previous researchers have found differing effects about this practice that might be inconclusive due to sample sizes. In this article, we analyze the association between author-suggested reviewers and review invitation, review scores, acceptance rates, and subjective review quality using a large dataset of close to 8K manuscripts from 46K authors and 21K reviewers from the journal PLOS ONE’s Neuroscience section. We found that all-author-suggested review panels increase the chances of acceptance by 20 percent points vs all-editor-suggested panels while agreeing to review less often. While PLOS ONE has since ended the practice of asking for suggested reviewers, many others still use them and perhaps should consider the results presented here.