Interdisciplinary Metaresearch Group, School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Department of Educational Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Elife. 2020 Nov 19;9:e62529. doi: 10.7554/eLife.62529.
Peer review practices differ substantially between journals and disciplines. This study presents the results of a survey of 322 editors of journals in ecology, economics, medicine, physics and psychology. We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers, and that less than 6% used a form of open peer review. Most journals did not have an official policy on altering reports from reviewers, but 91% of editors identified at least one situation in which it was appropriate for an editor to alter a report. Editors were also asked for their views on five issues related to publication ethics. A majority expressed support for co-reviewing, reviewers requesting access to data, reviewers recommending citations to their work, editors publishing in their own journals, and replication studies. Our results provide a window into what is largely an opaque aspect of the scientific process. We hope the findings will inform the debate about the role and transparency of peer review in scholarly publishing.
同行评审实践在期刊和学科之间有很大的差异。本研究对生态学、经济学、医学、物理学和心理学领域的 322 名期刊编辑进行了调查，结果如下。我们发现，在所调查的期刊中，有 49%的期刊检查了所有稿件的剽窃情况，61%的期刊允许作者推荐赞成和反对特定审稿人的意见，而不到 6%的期刊采用了公开同行评审的形式。大多数期刊没有关于修改审稿人报告的正式政策，但 91%的编辑确定了至少有一种情况下编辑应该修改报告。编辑还被问及与出版道德相关的五个问题的看法。大多数编辑对共同评审、审稿人要求获取数据、审稿人推荐引用自己的工作、编辑在自己的期刊上发表文章以及复制研究表示支持。我们的研究结果为科学过程中这个在很大程度上不透明的方面提供了一个窗口。我们希望这些发现将为同行评审在学术出版中的作用和透明度的争论提供信息。
