Quantifying professionalism in peer review

Travis G Gerwing; Alyssa M Allen Gerwing; Stephanie Avery-Gomm; Chi-Yeung Choi; Jeff C Clements; Joshua A Rash

doi:10.1186/s41073-020-00096-x

Quantifying professionalism in peer review

Res Integr Peer Rev. 2020 Jul 24:5:9. doi: 10.1186/s41073-020-00096-x. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Travis G Gerwing¹, Alyssa M Allen Gerwing², Stephanie Avery-Gomm³, Chi-Yeung Choi⁴, Jeff C Clements⁵, Joshua A Rash⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia Canada.
² Sidney Museum and Archives, Sidney, British Columbia Canada.
³ Science and Technology Branch, Environment and Climate Change Canada, National Wildlife Research Centre, Ottawa, Ontario Canada.
⁴ School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.
⁵ Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
⁶ Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland Canada.

Abstract

Background: The process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.

Methods: We evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of "Ecology and Evolution" and "Behavioural Medicine," of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of "unprofessional comments" and "incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques" using an a-prior rubric based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.

Results: Overall, 12% (179) of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% (611) contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques (IIUC).

Conclusions: The large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review.

Keywords: Biology; Peer review; Psychology.