A framework for assessing the peer review duration of journals: case study in computer science
- PDF / 2,311,307 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 37 Downloads / 163 Views
A framework for assessing the peer review duration of journals: case study in computer science Besim Bilalli1 · Rana Faisal Munir2 · Alberto Abelló1 Received: 20 June 2020 / Accepted: 1 October 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract In various fields, scientific article publication is a measure of productivity and in many occasions it is used as a critical factor for evaluating researchers. Therefore, a lot of time is dedicated to writing articles that are then submitted for publication in journals. Nevertheless, the publication process in general and the review process in particular tend to be rather slow. This is the case for instance of computer science (CS) journals. Moreover, the process typically lacks in transparency, where information about the duration of the review process is at best provided in an aggregated manner, if made available at all. In this paper, we develop a framework as a step towards bringing more reliable data with respect to review duration. Based on this framework, we implement a tool—journal response time (JRT), that allows for automatically extracting the review process data and helps researchers to find the average response times of journals, which can be used to study the duration of CS journals’ peer review process. The information is extracted as metadata from the published articles, when available. This study reveals that the response times publicly provided by publishers differ from the actual values obtained by JRT (e.g., for ten selected journals the average duration reported by publishers deviates by more than 500% from the actual average value calculated from the data inside the articles), which we suspect could be from the fact that, when calculating the aggregated values, publishers consider the review time of rejected articles too (including quick desk-rejections that do not require reviewers). Keywords Peer review process · Review process duration · Review process quality
* Besim Bilalli [email protected] Rana Faisal Munir [email protected] Alberto Abelló [email protected] 1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech, Barcelona, Spain
2
Eurecat Centre Tecnológic, Barcelona, Spain
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
Introduction In the world of science in general and of computer science (CS) in particular, a typical measure of productivity is the number of scientific articles published in the journals related to the field of study. The number of publications is an indirect measure of the impact and relevance of the scientist, since the higher it is, the more visible the author is. In addition, at times, this number is critical for getting a better position in universities or in different research departments (R&D). Therefore, the phrase “publish or perish” (sometimes paraphrased as “be cited or perish”) is commonly used to describe the pressure researchers feel to publish their research findings in order to stay relevant and successful in the academic community.1 The number of publications is a matter of concern for eve
Data Loading...
