 The “invisible hand” of peer review: The implications of author-referee networks on peer review in a scholarly journalPierpaolo Dondio, Niccolò Casnici, Francisco Grimaldo, Nigel Gilbert and Flaminio Squazzoni Journal of Informetrics, 2019, vol. 13, issue 2, 708-716 Abstract: Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. This means that their positions in the network structure of the community could influence the process, while peer review could in turn influence subsequent networking and collaboration. This paper aims to map these complex network implications by looking at 2232 author/referee couples in an interdisciplinary journal that uses double blind peer review. By reconstructing temporal co-authorship networks, we found that referees tended to recommend more positively submissions by authors who were within three steps in their collaboration network. We also found that co-authorship network positions changed after peer review, with the distances between network neighbours decreasing more rapidly than could have been expected had the changes been random. This suggests that peer review could not only reflect but also create and accelerate scientific collaboration. Keywords: Peer review; Author-referee networks; Co-authorship network; Collaboration; Scholarly journals (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:13:y:2019:i:2:p:708-716 DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2019.03.018 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier |
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