Putting peer review to the test: A response to Caputo

Abstract

In a recent essay in Families in Society, Caputo replies to my call for a more robust system of peer review. In this brief response, I outline points of agreement and disagreement between the two of us. Ultimately, I find that our overarching goal, if perhaps implicitly, is the same: We both want to see a better system of peer review in the discipline of social work. I close with some considerations about the testing of peer review within social work journals, which I hope will help pave the way toward a more fruitful, rigorous, and transparent programme of research and knowledge governance.

Making peer review evidence-based: It’s time to open the "black box"

“…A recent set of articles (Dunleavy, 2021a(Dunleavy, , 2021b, makes the case that the traditional double-blind model of peer review (henceforth simply "peer review"), used throughout the field of social work, is insufficient for appraising the quality of research and scholarship submitted for publication, and that a more dynamic and robust model was required. In this research note, I support and extend those arguments by further articulating one actionable solution that has been rarely discussed in the social work literature, 1 but which has been increasingly advocated for (e.g., Godlee, 2002;Ross-Hellauer, 2017a) and adopted (e.g., APS, 2022;"Transparent Peer Review", 2016;"Transparency in Peer Review", 2019;"Infant and Child Development", 2020) across the biomedical and social sciences: open peer review (OPR).…”