What We Still Don't Know About Peer Review

Omar Sabaj Meruane, Carlos González Vergara and Álvaro Pina-Stranger ()
Additional contact information
Omar Sabaj Meruane: USERENA - Universidad de La Serena
Carlos González Vergara: UC - Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Álvaro Pina-Stranger: CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Despite criticisms, the peer review process (PRP) is undoubtedly well established as an official and legitimated mechanism for evaluating and controlling scientific production. Although PRP has been a prominent object of study, we argue in this article that empirical research on PRP has not been addressed in a comprehensive way. Nine categories were applied to 150 empirical research articles on the topic with results revealing various gaps in empirical PRP research: (1) the research has been dedicated to the evaluation of the system rather than to the actual description of PRP as a concrete socio-discursive practice; (2) the most productive group of studies considers the multiple relationships between the sociological attributes (socio-demographic or scientometrical) of the actors (authors, reviewers, and editors) and the results of the process but does not take into account the texts exchanged by those actors; and (3) the few studies that do analyze the texts interchanged in the process do not take into account any of the variables included (such as scientometrical data, agreement, and rejection rates) in the more productive areas of the field. This lack of integration among the methodological approaches to PRP results in a partial comprehension of this important process, which determines the production and dissemination of an important part of scientific knowledge.

Keywords: peer review; research articles; production and evaluation of scientific knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 47 (2), pp.180-212. ⟨10.3138/jsp.47.2.180⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:halshs-01269914

DOI: 10.3138/jsp.47.2.180

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().