Food for thought! Surely, the process of peer review and acceptance of research papers for publication in a prestigious science journal is not perfect, but how much does it deviate from accepted standards?
I guess, it should be acknowledged and applauded that Science opened it's books to allow for this kind of research into their practices!
E.g. it appears papers from single authors (possibly also small teams of researchers) may have a harder time to get published compared to papers authored by larger teams or by researchers from prestigious institutions. Could this be a serious and damaging bias? Quite possibly!
"Getting published in Science and other prominent journals can make careers and shape future research. Now an unusual study has shed light on potential biases in acceptance rates at Science and where they may arise in the journal’s complex process of choosing papers for publication.
Science and its sister journal, Science Advances, provided a research team a rare glimpse of their confidential data on more than 110,000 manuscripts submitted from 2015 to 2020.
U.S. authors and large teams appear to have had an edge in acceptance rate.
Authors in China, on the other hand, had a particularly low rate of 2.3%.
The overall average rate for all submissions was 6.1%. Study co-author Aaron Clauset presented the findings this month at the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. ..."
"... The study shines a light on potential biases in acceptance and where they may arise in the complex process of choosing papers for publication. ..."
From the abstract:
"Objective
To make publicly available a deidentified dataset of manuscript submissions and associated editorial metadata at Science and Science Advances (2 elite multidisciplinary journals) and quantify the manuscript and author characteristics associated with outcomes over the 2 stages of evaluation at these highly selective journals:
(1) editorial review, when journal editors screen and select a smaller set of submissions for detailed consideration, and
(2) peer review, when editors recruit outside experts to evaluate manuscripts.
Peer review at elite scientific journals is a high-stakes process whose outcomes have a broad influence in science and society.
However, the need to maintain peer review’s confidentiality has limited the range of data available for scientific study. This lack of peer review data makes it difficult to assess how well elite journals achieve the scientific community’s ideals or to improve and test theories to improve their evaluation processes.
Design
We introduced and described a manuscript-level dataset of 110,303 deidentified evaluations of manuscripts submitted to Science and Science Advances over a 5-year period (2015-2019), each with a standard set of author and manuscript characteristics, and we conducted a series of logistic regression analyses to quantify the correlates of success in the initial editorial review stage (desk rejections) and the subsequent peer review stage at both journals.
Results
Each manuscript record includes author, editor, and manuscript characteristics, including topic, team size, institutional prestige, gender, geographic region, evaluation scores, and editor decisions;
personally identifiable and reidentifiable information, including the text of the reviews, is excluded.
Our statistical analyses revealed strong associations with institutional prestige, team size, manuscript topic, and country, which are primarily attributable (via a mediation analysis) to the influence of the editor, even as the tenor of advice from outside experts correlates strongly with the final editorial decision ... Corresponding authors who are men appear to have a small but significant advantage with editors and reviewers at Science, while authors based in China have a significant disadvantage."
ScienceAdviser
