Does open peer review improve citation count? Evidence from a propensity score matching analysis of PeerJ
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Does open peer review improve citation count? Evidence from a propensity score matching analysis of PeerJ Qianjin Zong1 · Yafen Xie2 · Jiechun Liang1 Received: 1 March 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract This study aims to investigate whether open peer review can improve citation count. Articles published in PeerJ during 2013 and 2015 were chosen as the data set. Two categories of the articles were generated: articles with closed peer review history and articles with open peer review history. A propensity score matching with the radius matching method was performed using 14 confounding variables. The other five common matching methods of propensity score matching, the bias-adjusted matching estimator developed by Abadie and Imbens (Simple and bias-corrected matching estimators for average treatment effects, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, pp 1–57, 2002), and the data set excluding articles with an extremely high citation count were used to check the robustness of the results. The results of this study showed that articles with open peer review history could be expected to have significantly greater citation counts than articles with closed peer review history. Our results suggest that open peer review can improve citation count, and that the best practice for open peer review might be a compromise open peer review. Keywords Open peer review · Public peer review · Transparent peer review · Altmetrics · Citation count · Propensity score matching
Introduction Peer review is a central part of science (Kelly et al. 2014; Masic 2016; Tennant et al. 2017). From the perspective of the transparency of the process, peer review can be divided into closed peer review and open peer review (the latter of which is hereafter referred to as OPR) (WileyPress 2018). A closed peer review can be a single blind review, a double blind review or a triple blind review. In all closed peer reviews, the author of a manuscript does not know who the reviewers are. Nowadays, the closed peer review, especially the single blind review, is the most common form of peer review among scientific journals (WileyPress 2018). However, the closed peer review has received much criticism regarding the * Qianjin Zong [email protected] 1
School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China
2
Guangdong Provincial Work Injury Rehabilitation Hospital, Guangzhou 510440, China
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Scientometrics
lack of openness of the review process (Walker and da Silva 2015). Therefore, OPR is being increasingly considered in order to make the peer review process more transparent. OPR is an umbrella term for many different models (Elsevier 2018; Foxe and Bolam 2017), such as publication of peer review reports alongside the published article (signed or anonymous), or publication of peer review reports (signed or anonymous) together with authors’ and editors’ responses alongside the published article. OPR has attracted much attention (Ahmad and Shiratuddin 2008) and has be
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