Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation

J. Armstrong

General Economics and Teaching from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I reviewed the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review, which consisted of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, results-blind reviews, structured rating sheets, open peer review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it

Keywords: peer review; journals; publications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2004-12-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 33
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/get/papers/0412/0412027.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpgt:0412027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in General Economics and Teaching from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).