Scholarly peer review or academic peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher (i.e., the editor-in-chief, the editorial board, or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph, or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review. Academic peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) academic field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is widely used to increase academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, criticism of peer review include failure to prevent publication of invalid research or scientific fraud, low correlation with future impact, slowness, and lack of accountability.
History The first record of an editorial pre-publication peer-review is from 1665 by Henry Oldenburg, the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society at the Royal Society of London. The first peer-reviewed publication might have been the Medical Essays and Observations published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1731. The present-day peer-review system evolved from this 18th-century process, began to involve external reviewers in the mid-19th-century, and did not become commonplace until the mid-20th-century. Peer review became a touchstone of the scientific method, but until the end of the 19th century was often performed directly by an editor-in-chief or editorial committee. Editors of scientific journals at that time made publication decisions without seeking outside input, i.e. an external panel of reviewers, giving established authors latitude in their journalistic discretion. For example, Albert Einstein's four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were evaluated by the journal's editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien, both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of these papers. On a much later occasion, Einstein was severely critical of the external review process, saying that he had not authorized John Torrence Tate Sr., the editor in chief of Physical Review, to show his manuscript "to specialists before it is printed", and informing him that he would "publish the paper elsewhere" – which he did, with substantial modifications. While some medical journals started to systematically appoint external reviewers, it is only since the middle of the 20th century that this practice has spread widely and that external reviewers have been given some visibility within academic journals, including being thanked by authors and editors. A 2003 editorial in Nature stated that, in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas." Nature itself instituted formal peer review only in 1967. Journals such as Science and the American Journal of Medicine increasingly relied on external reviewers in the 1950s and 1960s, in part to reduce the editorial workload. In the 20th century, peer review also became common for science funding allocations. This process appears to have developed independently from that of editorial peer review. Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and reduces the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by academic scholars and professionals. Non-peer-reviewed work does not contribute, or contributes less, to the academic credit of a scholar (such as the h-index), although this heavily depends on the field.
Justification
It is difficult and time-consuming for authors and researchers, whether individually or in a team, to spot and provide feedback on every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This is not necessarily a reflection on those concerned, but because with a new and perhaps eclectic subject, an opportunity for improvement may be more obvious to someone with special expertise or who simply looks at it with a fresh eye. Therefore, showing work to others increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified and improved. For both grant-funding and publication in a scholarly journal, it is also normally a requirement that the subject is both novel and substantial. The decision whether or not to publish a scholarly article, or what should be modified before publication, ultimately lies with the publisher (editor-in-chief or the editorial board) to which the manuscript has been submitted. Similarly, the decision whether or not to fund a proposed project rests with an official of the funding agency. These individuals usually refer to the opinion of one or more reviewers in making their decision. This is primarily for three reasons:
Workload. A small group of editors/assessors cannot devote sufficient time to each of the many articles submitted to many journals. Miscellany of ideas. Were the editor/assessor to judge all submitted material themselves, approved material would solely reflect their opinion. Limited expertise. An editor/assessor cannot be expected to be sufficiently expert in all areas covered by a single journal or funding agency to adequately judge all submitted material. Reviewers are often anonymous and independent. However, some reviewers may choose to waive their anonymity, and in other limited circumstances, such as the examination of a formal complaint against the referee, or a court order, the reviewer's identity may have to be disclosed. Anonymity may be unilateral or reciprocal (single- or double-blinded reviewing). Since reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields discussed in the article, the process of peer review helps to keep some invalid or unsubstantiated claims out of the body of published research and knowledge. Scholars will read published articles outside their limited area of detailed expertise, and then rely, to some degree, on the peer-review process to have provided reliable and credible research that they can build upon for subsequent or related research. Significant scandal ensues when an author is found to have falsified the research included in an article, as other scholars, and the field of study itself, may have relied upon the invalid research. For US universities, peer reviewing of books before publication is a requirement for full membership of the Association of American University Presses. As experimentally controlled studies of this process are difficult to arrange, direct evidence that peer review improves the quality of published papers is scarce. One recent analysis of randomized controlled trial abstracts found that editorial and peer review processes led to substantive improvements between submission and publication.
Procedure In the case of proposed publications, the publisher (editor-in-chief or the editorial board, often with assistance of corresponding or associate editors) sends advance copies of an author's work or ideas to researchers or scholars who are experts in the field (known as "referees" or "reviewers"). Communication is nowadays normally by e-mail or through a web-based manuscript processing system such as ScholarOne, Scholastica, or Open Journal Systems. Depending on the field of study and on the specific journal, there are usually one to three referees for a given article. For example, Springer states that there are two or three reviewers per article. The peer-review process involves three steps:
Step 1: Desk evaluation An editor evaluates the manuscript to judge whether the paper will be passed on to journal referees. At this phase many articles receive a "desk reject", that is, the editor chooses not to pass along the article. The authors may or may not receive a letter of explanation. Desk rejection is intended to be a streamlined process so that editors may move past nonviable manuscripts quickly and provide authors with the opportunity to pursue a more suitable journal. For example, the European Accounting Review editors subject each manuscript to three questions to decide whether a manuscript moves forward to referees: 1) Is the article a fit for the journal's aims and scope, 2) is the paper content (e.g. literature review, methods, conclusions) sufficient and does the paper make a worthwhile contribution to the larger body of literature, and 3) does it follow format and technical specifications? If "no" to any of these, the manuscript receives a desk rejection. Desk rejection rates vary by journal. For example, in 2017 researchers at the World Bank compiled rejection rates of several global economics journals; the desk rejection rate ranged from 21% (Economic Lacea) to 66% (Journal of Development Economics). The American Psychological Association publishes rejection rates for several major publications in the field, and although they do not specify whether the rejection is pre- or post- desk evaluation, their figures in 2016 ranged from a low of 49% to a high of 90%.
Step 2: External review If the paper is not desk rejected, the editors send the manuscript to the referees, who are chosen for their expertise and distance from the authors. At this point, referees may reject, accept without changes (rare) or instruct the authors to revise and resubmit. Reasons vary for acceptance of an article by editors, but Elsevier published an article where three editors weigh in on factors that drive article acceptance. These factors include whether the manuscript: delivers "new insight into an important issue", will be useful to practitioners, advances or proposes a new theory, raises new questions, has appropriate methods and conclusion, presents a good argument based on the literature, and tells a good story. One editor notes that he likes papers that he "wished he'd done" himself. These referees each return an evaluation of the work to the editor, noting weaknesses or problems along with suggestions for improvement. Typically, most of the referees' comments are eventually seen by the author, though a referee can also send 'for your eyes only' comments to the publisher; scientific journals observe this convention almost universally. The editor then evaluates the referees' comments, her or his own opinion of the manuscript before passing a decision back to the author(s), usually with the referees' comments. Referees' evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from options provided by the journal or funding agency. For example, Nature recommends four courses of action:
to unconditionally accept the manuscript or the proposal, to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways to reject it, but encourage revision and invite re-submission to reject it outright. During this process, the role of the referees is advisory. The editor(s) is typically under no obligation to accept the opinions of the referees. However, the editor will most often follow the advice of the referees. Furthermore, the referees in scientific publication do not act as a group, do not communicate with each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities or evaluations. Proponents argue that if the reviewers of a paper are unknown to each other, the editor(s) can more easily verify the objectivity of the reviews. There is usually no requirement that the referees achieve consensus, with the decision instead often made by the editor(s) based on her best judgement of the arguments. In situations where multiple referees disagree substantially about the quality of a work, there are a number of strategies for reaching a decision. The paper may be rejected outright, or the editor may choose which reviewer's point the authors should address. When a publisher receives very positive and very negative reviews for the same manuscript, the editor will often solicit one or more additional reviews as a tie-breaker. As another strategy in the case of ties, the publisher may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. If a publisher does not feel confident to weigh the persuasiveness of a rebuttal, the publisher may solicit a response from the referee who made the original criticism. An editor may convey communications back and forth between authors and a referee, in effect allowing them to debate a point. Even in these cases, however, publishers do not allow multiple referees to confer with each other, though each reviewer may often see earlier comments submitted by other reviewers. The goal of the process is explicitly not to reach consensus or to persuade anyone to change their opinions, but instead to provide material for an informed editorial decision. One early study regarding referee disagreement found that agreement was greater than chance, if not much greater than chance, on six of seven article attributes (e.g. literature review and final recommendation to publish), but this study was small and it was conducted on only one journal. At least one study has found that reviewer disagreement is not common, but this study is also small and on only one journal. Traditionally, reviewers would often remain anonymous to the authors, but this standard varies both with time and with academic field. In some academic fields, most journals offer the reviewer the option of remaining anonymous or not, or a referee may opt to sign a review, thereby relinquishing anonymity. Published papers sometimes contain, in the acknowledgments section, thanks to anonymous or named referees who helped improve the paper. For example, Nature journals provide this option. Sometimes authors may exclude certain reviewers: one study conducted on the Journal of Investigative Dermatology found that excluding reviewers doubled the chances of article acceptance. Some scholars are uncomfortable with this idea, arguing that it distorts the scientific process. Others argue that it protects against referees who are biased in some manner (e.g. professional rivalry, grudges). In some cases, authors can choose referees for their manuscripts. mSphere, an open-access journal in microbial science, has moved to this model. Editor-in-Chief Mike Imperiale says this process is designed to reduce the time it takes to review papers and permit the authors to choose the most appropriate reviewers. But a scandal in 2015 shows how this choosing reviewers can encourage fraudulent reviews. Fake reviews were submitted to the Journal of the Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone System in the names of author-recommended reviewers, causing the journal to eliminate this option.
Step 3: Revisions If the manuscript has not been rejected during peer review, it returns to the authors for revisions. During this phase, the authors address the concerns raised by reviewers. William Stafford Noble offers ten rules for responding to reviewers. His rules include:
"Provide an overview, then quote the full set of reviews" "Be polite and respectful of all reviewers" "Accept the blame" "Make the response self-contained" "Respond to every point raised by the reviewer" "Use typography to help the reviewer navigate your response" "Whenever possible, begin your response to each comment with a direct answer to the point being raised" "When possible, do what the reviewer asks" "Be clear about what changed relative to the previous version" "If necessary, write the response twice" (i.e. write a version for "venting" but then write a version the reviewers will see) In economics, some scholars have argued that the revision stage has expanded from evaluation into excessive improvement demands. A 2024 review of economics peer review described referee overreach and excessive revisions as contributing to longer papers and slower publication.
Recruiting referees At a journal or book publisher, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor. When a manuscript arrives, an editor solicits reviews from scholars or other experts who may or may not have already expressed a willingness to referee for that journal or book division. Granting agencies typically recruit a panel or committee of reviewers in advance of the arrival of applications. Referees are supposed to inform the editor of any conflict of interests that might arise. Journals or individual editors may invite a manuscript's authors to name people whom they consider qualified to referee their work. For some journals this is a requirement of submission. Authors are sometimes also given the opportunity to name natural candidates who should be disqualified, in which case they may be asked to provide justification (typically expressed in terms of conflict of interest). Editors solicit author input in selecting referees because academic writing typically is very specialized. Editors often oversee many specialties, and can not be experts in all of them. But after an editor selects referees from the pool of candidates, the editor typically is obliged not to disclose the referees' identities to the authors, and in scientific journals, to each other. Policies on such matters differ among academic disciplines. One difficulty with respect to some manuscripts is that, there may be few scholars who truly qualify as experts, people who have themselves done work similar to that under review. This can frustrate the goals of reviewer anonymity and avoidance of conflicts of interest. Low-prestige or local journals and granting agencies that award little money are especially handicapped with regard to recruiting experts. A potential hindrance in recruiting referees is that they are usually not paid, largely because doing so would itself create a conflict of interest. Furthermore, reviewing takes time away from their main activities, such as conducting their own research. To the would-be recruiter's advantage, most potential referees are authors themselves, or at least readers, who know that the publication system requires that experts donate their time. Serving as a referee can even be a condition of a grant, or professional association membership. In general, because of the explosion of the electronic information and the disproportionate increase in journal number versus the steady increase in the number of scientists has created a peer review crisis. The system currently in place is not responding to modern needs and will inevitably perish, unless radical reforms are made promptly. The academic system should revolutionize and establish strict peer review activity criteria essential for promotion and tenure, based on established universal metrics. That is, reward reviewers academically as it rewards researchers, which is currently not the case. All other incentives have failed. Referees have the opportunity to prevent work that does not meet the standards of the field from being published, which is a position of some responsibility. Editors are at a special advantage in recruiting a scholar when they have overseen the publication of their work, or if the scholar is one who hopes to submit manuscripts to that editor's publishing entity in the future. Granting agencies, similarly, tend to seek referees among their present or former grantees. Peerage of Science was an independent service and a community where reviewer recruitment happens via Open Engagement: authors submit their manuscript to the service where it is made accessible for any non-affiliated scientist, and 'validated users' choose themselves what they want to review. The motivation to participate as a peer reviewer comes from a reputation system where the quality of the reviewing work is judged and scored by other users, and contributes to user profiles. Peerage of Science does not charge any fees to scientists, and does not pay peer reviewers. Participating publishers however pay to use the service, gaining access to all ongoing processes and the opportunity to make publishing offers to the authors. With independent peer review services the author usually retains the right to the work throughout the peer review process, and may choose the most appropriate journal to submit the work to. Peer review services may also provide advice or recommendations on most suitable journals for the work. Journals may still want to perform an independent peer review, without the potential conflict of interest that financial reimbursement may cause, or the risk that an author has contracted multiple peer review services but only presents the most favorable one. An alternative or complementary model for achieving peer review is for the author to pay to have it undertaken. An example of such a service provider was Rubriq (2013–2017), which financially compensated peer reviewers for reviewing each work that they were assigned.
Different styles
Internal and external peer review External peer review is the ordinary process of peer review for scholarly journals. The first evidence of formal external peer reviews dates back to 1752, and it became widely used and more standardized after World War II. In this process, scholars who are not beholden to the journal or the author review submitted articles, and in doing so, restrain academic and scientific journals from using solely their own commercial interests as a guide on what to publish. Nature began requiring external peer review in 1973, and other journals quickly followed suit. Internal peer review is having a colleague in the same department or academic institution read over a paper before submitting it to a journal for external peer review. For example, economists in the same government agency may review their peers' papers, as a type of peer professional accountability. People such as Nobel laureate Dan Shechtman and organizations such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology use internal peer review because they believe that it gives them an opportunity to improve papers before submitting them to a journal. Internal peer review is also recommended for authors with weak writing skills. Unlike external peer review, internal peer reviewers do not have any distance from institutional goals and are not as effective as independent external reviewers at mitigating conflicts of interest. Internal peer reviewers also suffer from an in-house expert bias, thus overlooking problems that would be spotted by someone outside the organization or by someone from an adjacent academic discipline. Internal peer review has also been used to improve the quality of research grant applications. The phrase internal peer review is also used to describe post-submission review by a journal's editors, before sending them out for external peer review. The Health Policy and Planning journal, for example, reports that 60% of submitted articles are rejected by the editors because the submissions are not appropriate for the journal (e.g., the submitted paper does not discuss any health policies).
Anonymous and attributed For most scholarly publications, the identity of the reviewers is kept anonymised (also called "blind peer review"). The alternative, attributed peer review involves revealing the identities of the reviewers. Some reviewers choose to waive their right to anonymity, even when the journal's default format is blind peer review. In anonymous peer review, reviewers are known to the journal editor or conference organiser but their names are not given to the article's author. In some cases, the author's identity can also be anonymised for the review process, with identifying information stripped from the document before review. The system is intended to reduce or eliminate bias. Some experts proposed blind review procedures for reviewing controversial research topics. In double-blind peer review, which has been fashioned by sociology journals in the 1950s and remains more common in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences, the identity of the authors is concealed from the reviewers ("blinded"), and vice versa, lest the knowledge of authorship or concern about disapprobation from the author bias their review. Critics of the double-blind review process point out that, despite any editorial effort to ensure anonymity, the process often fails to do so, since certain approaches, methods, writing styles, notations, etc., point to a certain group of people in a research stream, and even to a particular person. In many fields of "big science", the publicly available operation schedules of major equipments, such as telescopes or synchrotrons, would make the authors' names obvious to anyone who would care to look them up. Proponents of double-blind review argue that it performs no worse than single-blind, and that it generates a perception of fairness and equality in academic funding and publishing. Single-blind review is strongly dependent upon the goodwill of the participants, but no more so than double-blind review with easily identified authors. As an alternative to single-blind and double-blind review, authors and reviewers are encouraged to declare their conflicts of interest when the names of authors and sometimes reviewers are known to the other. When conflicts are reported, the conflicting reviewer can be prohibited from reviewing and discussing the manuscript, or his or her review can instead be interpreted with the reported conflict in mind; the latter option is more often adopted when the conflict of interest is mild, such as a previous professional connection or a distant family relation. The incentive for reviewers to declare their conflicts of interest is a matter of professional ethics and individual integrity. Even when the reviews are not public, they are still a matter of record and the reviewer's credibility depends upon how they represent themselves among their peers. Some software engineering journals, such as the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, use non-blind reviews with reporting to editors of conflicts of interest by both authors and reviewers. A more rigorous standard of accountability is known as an audit. Because reviewers are not paid, they cannot be expected to put as much time and effort into a review as an audit requires. Therefore, academic journals such as Science, organizations such as the American Geophysical Union, and agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation maintain and archive scientific data and methods in the event another researcher wishes to replicate or audit the research after publication. The traditional anonymous peer review has been criticized for its lack of accountability, the possibility of abuse by reviewers or by those who manage the peer review process (that is, journal editors), its possible bias, and its inconsistency, alongside other flaws. Eugene Koonin, a senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, asserts that the system has "well-known ills" and advocates "open peer review".
Open peer review
Transparent peer review In transparent peer review the documents relating to the publication of the paper are published alongside the paper. This includes the initial report made by the peer reviewer, the authors' response to it, and the acceptance letter by the editor. The names of the reviewers may still be kept anonymous even in transparent peer review.
Pre- and post-publication peer review The process of peer review is not restricted to the publication process managed by academic journals. In particular, some forms of peer review can occur before an article is submitted to a journal and/or after it is published by the journal.
Pre-publication peer review Manuscripts are typically reviewed by colleagues before submission, and if the manuscript is uploaded to preprint servers, such as ArXiv, BioRxiv or SSRN, researchers can read and comment on the manuscript. The practice to upload to preprint servers, and the activity of discussion heavily depend on the field, and it allows an open pre-publication peer review. The advantage of this method is speed and transparency of the review process. Anyone can give feedback, typically in form of comments, and typically not anonymously. These comments are also public, and can be responded to, therefore author-reviewer communication is not restricted to the typical 2–4 rounds of exchanges in traditional publishing. The authors can incorporate comments from a wide range of people instead of feedback from the typically 3–4 reviewers. The disadvantage is that a far larger number of papers are presented to the community without any guarantee on quality.
Post-publication peer review After a manuscript is published, the process of peer review continues as publications are read, known as post-publication peer review. Readers will often send letters to the editor of a journal, or correspond with the editor via an on-line journal club. In this way, all "peers" may offer review and critique of published literature. The introduction of the "epub ahead of print" practice in many journals has made possible the simultaneous publication of unsolicited letters to the editor together with the original paper in the print issue. A variation on this theme is open peer commentary, in which commentaries from specialists are solicited on published articles and the authors are invited to respond. Journals using this process solicit and publish non-anonymous commentaries on the "target paper" together with the paper, and with original authors' reply as a matter of course. Open peer commentary was first implemented by the anthropologist Sol Tax, who founded the journal Current Anthropology in 1957. The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press, was founded by Stevan Harnad in 1978 and modeled on Current Anthropology's open peer commentary feature. Psycoloquy (1990–2002) was based on the same feature, but this time implemented online. Since 2016 open peer commentary is also provided by the journal Animal Sentience. In addition to journals hosting their own articles' reviews, there are also external, independent websites dedicated to post-publication peer-review, such as PubPeer which allows anonymous commenting of published literature and pushes authors to answer these comments. It has been suggested that post-publication reviews from these sites should be editorially considered as well. The megajournals F1000Research and ScienceOpen publish openly both the identity of the reviewers and the reviewer's report alongside the article. Some journals use post-publication peer review as formal review method, instead of pre-publication review. This was first introduced in 2001, by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). More recently F1000Research, Qeios, and ScienceOpen were launched as megajournals with post-publication review as formal review method. At ACP, F1000Research, and Qeios peer reviewers are formally invited, much like at pre-publication review journals. Articles that pass peer review at those three journals are included in external scholarly databases.
Social media and informal peer review Recent research has called attention to the use of social media technologies and science blogs as a means of informal, post-publication peer review, as in the case of the #arseniclife (or GFAJ-1) controversy. In December 2010, an article published in Scienceexpress (the ahead-of-print version of Science) generated both excitement and skepticism, as its authors – led by NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon – claimed to have discovered and cultured a certain bacteria that could replace phosphorus with arsenic in its physiological building blocks. At the time of the article's publication, NASA issued press statements suggesting that the finding would impact the search for extraterrestrial life, sparking excitement on Twitter under the hashtag #arseniclife, as well as criticism from fellow experts who voiced skepticism via their personal blogs. Ultimately, the controversy surrounding the article attracted media attention, and one of the most vocal scientific critics – Rosemary Redfield – formally published in July 2012 regarding her and her colleagues' unsuccessful attempt to replicate the NASA scientists' original findings. Researchers following the impact of the #arseniclife case on social media discussions and peer review processes concluded the following:
Our results indicate that interactive online communication technologies can enable members in the broader scientific community to perform the role of journal reviewers to legitimize scientific information after it has advanced through formal review channels. In addition, a variety of audiences can attend to scientific controversies through these technologies and observe an informal process of post-publication peer review. (p 946)
Result-blind peer review
Studies which report a positive or statistically significant result are far more likely to be published than ones which do not. A counter-measure to this positivity bias is to hide or make unavailable the results in the paper, making journal acceptance more like scientific grant agencies reviewing research proposals. Versions include:
Result-blind peer review or results blind peer review, first proposed 1966: Reviewers receive an edited version of the submitted paper which omits the results and conclusion section. In a two-stage version, a second round of reviews or editorial judgment is based on the full paper version, which was first proposed in 1977. Conclusion-blind review, proposed by Robin Hanson in 2007 extends this further asking all authors to submit a positive and a negative version, and only after the journal has accepted the article authors reveal which is the real version. Pre-accepted articles or outcome-unbiased journals or advance publication review or registered reports or prior to results submission or early acceptance extends study pre-registration to the point that journals accepted or reject papers based on the version of the paper written before the results or conclusions have been made (an enlarged study protocol), but instead describes the theoretical justification, experimental design, and statistical analysis. Only once the proposed hypothesis and methodology have been accepted by reviewers, the authors would collect the data or analyze previously collected data. A limited variant of a pre-accepted article was The Lancet's study protocol review from 1997 to 2015 reviewed and published randomized trial protocols with a guarantee that the eventual paper would at least be sent out to peer review rather than immediately rejected. For example, Nature Human Behaviour has adopted the registered report format, as it "shift[s] the emphasis from the results of research to the questions that guide the research and the methods used to answer them". The European Journal of Personality defines this format: "In a registered report, authors create a study proposal that includes theoretical and empirical background, research questions/hypotheses, and pilot data (if available). Upon submission, this proposal will then be reviewed prior to data collection, and if accepted, the paper resulting from this peer-reviewed procedure will be published, regardless of the study outcomes." An analysis of almost 100 preregistered studies showed that registered reports adhered to an average of 92% of their preregistrations, but unreviewed preregistrations adhered only to 60%. These findings suggest that when the initial study plan is accepted for publication, there may be a reduced incentive to change preregistered plans. The following journals used result-blind peer review or pre-accepted articles:
The European Journal of Parapsychology, under Martin Johnson (who proposed a version of Registered Reports in 1974), began accepting papers based on submitted designs and then publishing them, from 1976 to 1993, and published 25 RRs total The International Journal of Forecasting used opt-in result-blind peer review and pre-accepted articles from before 1986 through 1996/1997. The journal Applied Psychological Measurement offered an opt-in "advance publication review" process from 1989 to 1996, ending use after only 5 papers were submitted. The JAMA Internal Medicine found in a 2009 survey that 86% of its reviewers would be willing to work in a result-blind peer review process, and ran a pilot experiment with a two-stage result-blind peer review, showing the unblinded step benefited positive studies more than negatives. but the journal does not currently use result-blind peer review. The Center for Open Science encourages using "Registered Reports" (pre-accepted articles) beginning in 2013. As of October 2017, ~80 journals offer Registered Reports in general, have had special issues of Registered Reports, or limited acceptance of Registered Reports (e.g. replications only) including AIMS Neuroscience, Cortex, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Social Psychology, & Comparative Political Studies Comparative Political Studies published results of its pilot experiment of 19 submissions of which 3 were pre-accepted in 2016. the process worked well but submissions were weighted towards quantitative experimental designs, and reduced the amount of 'fishing' as submitters and reviewers focused on theoretical backing, substantive importance of results, with attention to the statistical power and implications of a null result, concluding that "we can clearly state that this form of review lead to papers that were of the highest quality. We would love to see a top journal adopt results-free review as a policy, at very least allowing results-free review as one among several standard submission options."
Extended peer review Extended peer review is the process of including people and groups with experience beyond that of working academics in the processes of assuring the quality of research. If conducted systematically, this can lead to more reliable, or applicable, results than a peer review process conducted purely by academics.
Criticism
Scholarly peer review has been subject to several criticisms, and various proposals for reforming the system have been suggested over the years. Many studies have emphasized the problems inherent to the process of peer review. Moreover, Ragone et al. have shown that there is a low correlation between peer review outcomes and the future impact measured by citations. Various biomedical editors in particular have expressed criticism of peer review. A Cochrane review found little empirical evidence that peer review ensures quality in biomedical research, while a second systematic review and meta-analysis found a need for evidence-based peer review in biomedicine given the paucity of assessment of the interventions designed to improve the process. To an outsider, the anonymous, pre-publication peer review process is opaque. Certain journals are accused of not carrying out stringent peer review in order to more easily expand their customer base, particularly in journals where authors pay a fee before publication. Richard Smith, MD, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has claimed that peer review is "inef