Editorial behaviors in peer review

Authored by Wei Wang, Jun Zhang, Xiangjie Kong, Zhen Chen, Feng Xia, Xianwen Wang

Date Published: 2016

DOI: 10.1186/s40064-016-2601-y

Sponsors: Chinese National Natural Science Foundation Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

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.

Tags

Simulation Science