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Difficulty of recruiting reviewers predicts review scores and editorial decisions at six journals of ecology and evolution

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Abstract

Journal peer review relies on the willingness of researchers to volunteer their time to review manuscripts. However, editors often have difficulty recruiting reviewers, and this difficulty can vary quite substantially among manuscripts. This study examines whether the difficulty recruiting reviewers influences outcomes of the peer review process at six journals of ecology and evolution. The difficulty editors had recruiting reviewers varied substantially among papers, with editors successfully recruiting the first two people invited just 22% of the time, and being declined by two or more invitees for more than half (56%) of reviewed papers. Papers for which editors had more difficulty recruiting reviewers were more likely to be declined at all six journals, with an increase in the odds of acceptance ranging from a low of 3.5 ± 1.2% to a high of 17.3 ± 2.0% for each 10% increase in the proportion of reviewers agreeing to review. Papers for which editors had more difficulty recruiting reviewers were also reviewed less positively at all six journals, and this influence on review scores explained most but not all of the influence of recruitment difficulty on outcomes. Reviewers invited close together in sequence (without many declined invitations between them) were more consistent in the scores they submit than were reviewers invited more greatly separated in sequence, suggesting that editors recruit different kinds of reviewers early versus late in the reviewer invitation sequence. However, the scores submitted by later-recruited reviewers were not less predictive of the editor’s decision than were scores of early-recruited reviewers. The influence of reviewer recruitment difficulty on decisions, although of small effect, should be considered among the diversity of variables that influence outcomes of the editorial and peer review process at academic journals.

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Acknowledgements

The British Ecological Society and the Society for the Study of Evolution provided permission to access their databases for this peer review analysis. Katie Simmons assisted with extracting the reviewer database for Evolution, and Emilie Aimé, Christopher Grieves, Kate Harrison, Simon Hoggart, Jennifer Meyer, Erika Newton, Alice Plane, James Ross and Leila Walker extracted the reviewer databases for the British Ecological Society journals. Emilie Aimé, C. Sean Burns, Allyssa Kilanowski, Melise Lecheta, Josiah Ritchey and Boris Sauterey provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work was approved by the University of Kentucky’s Institutional Review Board (IRB 15–0890). C. Fox is Executive Editor of one of the journals examined in this study (Functional Ecology).

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Correspondence to Charles W. Fox.

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Fox, C.W. Difficulty of recruiting reviewers predicts review scores and editorial decisions at six journals of ecology and evolution. Scientometrics 113, 465–477 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2489-5

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