Many journals rely on Dryad to publish data connected to research articles. We make it simple for editors to ensure underlying data is accessible through submission and peer review with Private for Peer Review. With this functionality, at the poi…
Category: peer review
For Epistemic Respect – Against Reviewer 2
Despite the efforts of journals and editors to the contrary, the well-known academic folk-devil, Reviewer 2 continues to make the lives of researchers miserable. Gorgi Krlev and Andre Spicer draw on a recent encounter with reviewer 2 and the subsequent…
Can artificial intelligence assess the quality of academic journal articles in the next REF?
In this blog post Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha, Paul Wilson, Mahshid Abdoli, Meiko Makita, Emma Stuart and Jonathan Levitt discuss the results of a recent project for UKRI that made recommendations about whether artificial intelligence (AI) could be us…
Sunlight not shadows: Double-anonymised peer review is not the answer to status bias
Responding to a recent paper supporting the implementation of double-anonymised peer review criteria as a means of reducing bias in favour of high profile academics, Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Tony Ross-Hellauer and Ludo Waltman, suggest open peer review ma…
Making sense of preprints by adding context – The Publish Your Reviews initiative
Improving scientific publishing is often framed as an issue of openness and speed and less often as one of context. In this post, Ludo Waltman and Jessica Polka make the case for a more contextualised approach to open access publishing and preprinting,…
The case against Revise and Resubmit
Extensive revising is required by many journals in the social sciences. It is expected that authors “revise and resubmit” (R&R) their manuscripts several times before they are accepted for publication, a process that is time consuming, demoralising…
Imperfect, boring, headed for change? 10 Ways to improve academic CV assessments
Academic CVs play a major role in research assessment and in shaping academic fields by sorting and selecting promising researchers. Their role in structuring and prioritizing information is therefore significant and has recently been criticised for fa…
There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review – can they co-exist?
Outlining their recent research into the different interests and commitments of groups looking to reform and improve scientific peer review, Ludo Waltman, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Stephen Pinfield, and Helen Buckley Woods identify four schools of though…
Peer review for academic jobs and grants continues to be shaped by metrics, especially if your reviewer is highly ranked
The aim of peer review for research grants and academic hiring boards is to provide expert independent judgement on the quality of research proposals and candidates. Based on findings from a recent survey, Liv Langfeldt, Dag W. Aksnes and Ingvild Reyme…
What does COVID-19 mean for the evaluation of the Impact criterion in REF2021?
The concept of research impact represents, to a degree, a formal way of understanding the productive relationships forged between academic research and the wider world. Unsurprisingly, these relationships took on entirely new dimensions as the COVID-19…