Editorial behaviors in peer review

Editors play a critical role in the peer review system. How do editorial behaviors affect the performance of peer review? No quantitative model to date allows us to measure the influence of editorial behaviors on different peer review stages such as, manuscript distribution and final decision making. Here, we propose an agent-based model in which the process of peer review is guided mainly by the social interactions among three kinds of agents representing authors, editors and reviewers respectively. We apply this model to analyze a number of editorial behaviors such as decision strategy, number of reviewers and editorial bias on peer review. We find out that peer review outcomes are significantly sensitive to different editorial behaviors. With a small fraction (10 %) of biased editors, the quality of accepted papers declines 11 %, which indicates that effects of editorial biased behavior is worse than that of biased reviewers (7 %). While several peer review models exist, this is the first account for the study of editorial behaviors that is validated on the basis of simulation analysis.

[1]  David M. Schultz,et al.  Are three heads better than two? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior affect the rejection rate , 2010, Scientometrics.

[2]  Bruce Edmonds,et al.  Simulating the Social Processes of Science , 2011, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[3]  Alan Hastings,et al.  The tragedy of the reviewer commons. , 2009, Ecology letters.

[4]  Stephen A. Gallo,et al.  The Validation of Peer Review through Research Impact Measures and the Implications for Funding Strategies , 2014, PloS one.

[5]  Chetna Desai,et al.  Reviewing the peer review , 2008, Indian journal of pharmacology.

[6]  J. Overbeke,et al.  Role of Editorial and Peer Review Processes in Publication Bias: Analysis of Drug Trials Submitted to Eight Medical Journals , 2014, PloS one.

[7]  Flaminio Squazzoni.  Peer Review with Multiple Reviewers (Version 1) , 2015 .

[8]  Owen L. Petchey,et al.  Imbalance in Individual Researcher's Peer Review Activities Quantified for Four British Ecological Society Journals, 2003-2010 , 2014, PloS one.

[9]  Stefano Allesina,et al.  Modeling peer review: an agent-based approach , 2012 .

[10]  Mario Paolucci,et al.  Mechanism change in a simulation of peer review: from junk support to elitism , 2014, Scientometrics.

[11]  D. Benos,et al.  The ups and downs of peer review. , 2007, Advances in physiology education.

[12]  J. Bohannon.  Who's afraid of peer review? , 2013, Science.

[13]  M. Hojat,et al.  Impartial Judgment by the “Gatekeepers” of Science: Fallibility and Accountability in the Peer Review Process , 2003, Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice.

[14]  J. Maner,et al.  Let’s Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is , 2014, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[15]  Lawrence Souder,et al.  The ethics of scholarly peer review: a review of the literature , 2011, Learn. Publ..

[16]  Flaminio Squazzoni,et al.  Social Simulation That 'Peers into Peer Review' , 2011, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[17]  Lutz Bornmann,et al.  Scientific peer review , 2011, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[18]  Paul J. Roebber,et al.  Peer Review, Program Officers and Science Funding , 2011, PloS one.

[19]  J. Crocker,et al.  Addressing Scientific Fraud , 2011, Science.

[20]  Andre C. R. Martins,et al.  Modelling Epistemic Systems , 2012, Theories and Simulations of Complex Social Systems.

[21]  H. Kanis,et al.  On Validation , 1994 .

[22]  Claudio Gandelli,et al.  Peer review under the microscope. An agent-based model of scientific collaboration , 2012, Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC).

[23]  Flaminio Squazzoni,et al.  Do Editors Have A Silver Bullet? An Agent-Based Model Of Peer Review , 2014, ECMS.

[24]  Claudio Gandelli,et al.  Opening the Black-Box of Peer Review: An Agent-Based Model of Scientist Behaviour , 2013, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[25]  Stefan Thurner,et al.  Peer-review in a world with rational scientists: Toward selection of the average , 2010, 1008.4324.

[26]  Cassidy R. Sugimoto,et al.  Bias in peer review , 2013, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[27]  N. Gilbert.  A Simulation of the Structure of Academic Science , 1997 .

[28]  Theodore Eugene Day,et al.  The big consequences of small biases: A simulation of peer review , 2015 .