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On peer review in computer science: analysis of its effectiveness and suggestions for improvement

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Abstract

In this paper we focus on the analysis of peer reviews and reviewers behaviour in a number of different review processes. More specifically, we report on the development, definition and rationale of a theoretical model for peer review processes to support the identification of appropriate metrics to assess the processes main characteristics in order to render peer review more transparent and understandable. Together with known metrics and techniques we introduce new ones to assess the overall quality (i.e. ,reliability, fairness, validity) and efficiency of peer review processes e.g. the robustness of the process, the degree of agreement/disagreement among reviewers, or positive/negative bias in the reviewers’ decision making process. We also check the ability of peer review to assess the impact of papers in subsequent years. We apply the proposed model and analysis framework to a large reviews data set from ten different conferences in computer science for a total of ca. 9,000 reviews on ca. 2,800 submitted contributions. We discuss the implications of the results and their potential use toward improving the analysed peer review processes. A number of interesting results were found, in particular: (1) a low correlation between peer review outcome and impact in time of the accepted contributions; (2) the influence of the assessment scale on the way how reviewers gave marks; (3) the effect and impact of rating bias, i.e. reviewers who constantly give lower/higher marks w.r.t. all other reviewers; (4) the effectiveness of statistical approaches to optimize some process parameters (e.g. ,number of papers per reviewer) to improve the process overall quality while maintaining the overall effort under control. Based on the lessons learned, we suggest ways to improve the overall quality of peer-review through procedures that can be easily implemented in current editorial management systems.

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Notes

  1. “With the authors consent, a paper already peer reviewed and accepted for publication by BMJ was altered to introduce eight weaknesses in design, analysis, or interpretation” (Godlee et al. 1998).

  2. Notice that this pragmatic choice does not imply that the authors believe blindly in citation count as being the only measure of impact. Indeed prior art has shown that it has some flaws (Krapivin et al. 2010) and could be extended to other novel metrics like number of downloads (Li et al. 2012) or other alternatives metrics (Bollen et al. 2005). However, we adopt it as it is a commonly accepted and accessible metric.

  3. When the second ranking is random, the formula for the divergence can be expressed analytically as \(NDiv_{\rho_i,\rho_{\rm a}}(t,n,{\mathcal{C}}) = \sum_{i=0}^ {t} p_{t}(i,n) w_{i},\) where \(p_{t}(i,n) = \frac{ C_{i}^ {t} C_{t-i}^{n-t} }{ C_{t}^ {n} }\) and \(w_{i} = \frac{t-i}{t}.\)

  4. In Fig. 2 the different scales have been normalized in the x-axis.

  5. See Table 1 for the nominal acceptance rate for all conferences.

  6. Also in these numerical experiments we repeated the simulations a number of runs (typically 10) to collect proper statistical data (i.e. mean value and standard deviation) for each experiment.

  7. Please note that in our reviews dataset the reviewers did not have access to other’s reviewers marks, so they could not have been influenced by previous reviews.

  8. Although Google Scholar has been criticized in the literature (e.g. Jacso 2010) mainly for the noise (spurious documents and citations) that it includes, it is however one of the few publicly available source of citations as well as with a high degree of coverage.

  9. Old conferences are the ones which took place in the period from 2003 to 2006, therefore “old” enough for checking the number of citations received during the subsequent years.

  10. This is the rationale behind some journals like PLoS ONE among others.

  11. The marks before the computation were normalized to the scale [0,1].

  12. We recall again that in our work we focus only on the quantitative aspect of peer review (i.e. marks) and not on the other important dimension of providing constructive feedbacks to authors.

  13. Both in C1 and C3 the cluster with minimal probability was the “immature” cluster.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is an extended version of the 12 pages paper titled “A Quantitative Analysis of Peer Review” presented at the 13th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, Durban (South Africa), 4–7 July 2011 (Ragone et al. 2011). We acknowledge the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission for the LIQUIDPUB project under FET-Open grant number: 213360. We also want to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript. Their comments have really helped us to improve our work, underlying something that we knew already (and mention in our work): peer review is not only focused on filtering and selecting manuscripts to publish but also to provide constructive feedbacks to authors.

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Correspondence to Maurizio Marchese.

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Ragone, A., Mirylenka, K., Casati, F. et al. On peer review in computer science: analysis of its effectiveness and suggestions for improvement. Scientometrics 97, 317–356 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1002-z

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