Editor’s Note: This third installment of posts for Peer Review Week is a guest post from Tom Culley and the team at Publons.
For centuries academic journals have brought modern research from around the globe into regularly published pages for consumption. At the heart of this system is peer review — the process we rely on to ensure the quality and integrity of scholarly communication. But as the research market grows exponentially the peer review system is feeling the strain.
Last week (10-15 September 2018) was peer review week and the theme was diversity in peer review. This item refers to work that highlights we aren’t there yet. In addition to including links to a few other items from last week, we’ve linked to a few other items about this essential component of quality research.
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Released on September 7th, the report combines novel results of a global survey alongside data from Publons, ScholarOne, and Web of Science. For the survey, Publons reached out to researchers via the Publons database of over 400,000 reviewers, and 1 million authors indexed in Web of Science. Of the more than 11,000 researchers who completed the survey, 69% were working at a university or college, 69% were men, and over 35% had 15 years or more experience writing and reviewing scholarly articles. The majority of reviewers came from Europe (37% — including the UK) and 13% worked in the areas of Clinical Medicine or Engineering respectively.*
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