Acceptance or decline of requests to review manuscripts: A gender-based approach from a public health journal

Abstract

Peer review in the scientific publication is widely used as a method to identify valuable knowledge. Editors have the task of selecting appropriate reviewers. We assessed the reasons given by potential reviewers for declining a request to review, and the factors associated with acceptance, taking into account the difference in the sex of the reviewer. This is a descriptive study of the review requests from a public health journal (Gaceta Sanitaria) with an enforced gender policy. The dependent variables were requests, response to requests, reasons potential reviewers gave for declining requests and time to review. We carried out a descriptive analysis of these indicators and applied logistic regression to analyze factors (professional and research/review experience) associated with having done at least one review in 2014-2015. Results were stratified by sex. Journal editors sent 1,775 requests to 773 potential reviewers; 52.3% of whom reviewed at least one manuscript. Of the 396 declined requests (22.3%), the most common reasons were lack of time and of experience (88.1%). No differences were observed by sex. In the multivariate analysis, having reviewed for the journal in previous years showed the strongest association with acceptance. Specific analyses of data on requests reviewers may be useful for improving the acceptance rates to review. This study did not show gender differences in several indicators of the reviewing process.

Analysis of peer reviewers’ response to invitations by gender and geographical region: cohort study of manuscripts reviewed at 21 biomedical journals before and during covid-19 pandemic

“…Peer review, pivotal to the publication process, is under increasing pressure and prone to many potential biases,891011 but the extent of these biases has been less investigated than other areas of the publication process as most peer review is done anonymously and reviews are not usually in the public domain 1213. Some studies have analysed the selection of peer reviewers and their response to invitations to review submissions to biomedical journals; however, as this information is confidential, these studies have largely been done within single journals and may not be representative beyond their communities 141516. Analyses of published peer reviews and public acknowledgment statements to named reviewers of biomedical journals have shown gender and geographical bias in the contributions 17181920…”

Editor Fatigue: Can Political Science Journals Increase Review Invitation-Acceptance Rates?

“…Perhaps the most commonly cited explanation is reviewer fatigue: with increasing pressure to publish and a rapidly increasing universe of political science journals, academics are inundated with invitations. Research on this issue, however, has generally found that the challenge has more to do with overall workload than with review requests themselves (Breuning et al 2015;Domínguez-Berjón et al 2018;Fox, Albert, and Vines 2017;Willis 2015). In a survey of American Political Science Association (APSA) members in 2013, for example, Djupe (2015) found that only 10% of respondents were doing more than one review each month.…”

How Many Papers Should Scientists Be Reviewing? An Analysis Using Verified Peer Review Reports

“…Early career researchers with less experience may not be appropriate reviewers for specific research questions, and late career researchers may be over-targeted to conduct reviews or biased [15]. Gender bias issues have also been found to affect peer review rates [16]. These are factors that may be hard to quantify, which is why focusing on determining the number of reviews required by the peer review system may help researchers by offering a means to improve the peer review system, and provide a basis for research on the second more complex aspect discussed here.…”