7 September 2018
Publons has announced the launch of the '2018 Global State of Peer Review' report, bringing together the results of a survey of 11k+ researchers with data from Publons, ScholarOne, and Web of Science.
The inaugural report asks four questions linked to the challenges facing the scientific and academic research community today:
- Who is doing peer review?
- How efficient is the peer review process?
- What do we know about the quality of peer review?
- What does the future hold?
The report compares and contrasts findings from established regions, and emerging regions. One of the major findings is that researchers from emerging regions are under-represented in the peer review process. It found that researchers from the USA, UK and Japan review significantly more than reviewers from emerging regions, especially when compared with how much relative peer review demand (by way of manuscript submissions) these regions generate. Peer reviewers in established regions also tend to accept fewer review invitations and take longer to review than their counterparts in emerging regions.
Other findings include:
- each year, across the globe, researchers spend roughly 68.5 million hours reviewing
- on average it takes 19.1 days for a researcher to peer review a paper
- editors tend to invite reviewers from their own geographical regions much more than chance would predict.
- reviewers write longer reviews, in terms of word count, and return their peer reviews faster for more prestigious journals; word count goes up and median days to complete a review reduces as Journal Impact Factor increases
- editors send more review invitations now than five years ago, however, once reviewers are found, review turnaround times are decreasing for some disciplines
- reviewers from emerging regions, such as Iran, write reviews that are less than half the length of reviewers from established regions (250 words compared to 528 words)
- review volumes from emerging regions, particularly China, are growing much faster than from established regions
The report, '2018 Global State of Peer Review', is available to download.