Outlining their recent research into the different interests and commitments of groups looking to reform and improve scientific peer review, Ludo Waltman, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Stephen Pinfield, and Helen Buckley Woods identify four schools of thought on the subject. Discussing their different aims and objectives, they highlight commonalities between them and also key areas in which they diverge. They suggest that in understanding these positions, it opens space for the purposeful inclusion of more varied forms of peer review for research.
The failings of the current approach to peer review are well known (e.g. the lack of regional and gender diversity). It stands at the cornerstone of quality research, but its biases are having damaging impacts on the scientific record. This blog post discusses four different approaches (and objectives) for re-engineering peer review. It also explores whether the four different models could operate together.
Recent work on peer review that we have undertaken in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) suggests to us that the landscape is shaped by four ‘schools of thought’:
- Quality & Reproducibility school
- Democracy & Transparency school
- Equity & Inclusion school
- Efficiency & Incentives school
The Schools
The Quality & Reproducibility school focuses on the role of peer review in evaluating and improving the quality and reproducibility of research. This school is interested in innovations in peer review that improve the quality of review reports and of published research. Examples include reviewer training, use of checklists, addition of a statistical reviewer, revealing of reviewer identities, and blinding of author identities. Reproducibility of research is also seen as key, with peer review playing an important role in this. Developments such as registered reports, in which peer review of a research plan and in-principle acceptance take place before carrying out data collection and analysis, have been introduced as an approach to improve the quality and reproducibility of research. Another focal issue for the Quality & Reproducibility school is safeguarding research integrity and identifying scientific misconduct.
