Quality censoring in peer review
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Quality censoring in peer review J. A. Garcia1 · Rosa Rodriguez‑Sánchez1 · J. Fdez‑Valdivia1 Received: 6 July 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract In a typical scenario in which a peer-reviewed journal has to match the uncertain manuscript’s quality with its quality standard, quality improvement is restricted by the journal’s quality standard. This is so because the reviewer usually seeks to ensure that the manuscript’s quality acceptably matches the journal’s standard. Think, for example, of a megajournal that has peer reviews for “technical correctness only” and not for novelty or impact on the field. However, the presence of quality improvement constraints not only leads to the quality of the review outcome being limited by the journal’s quality standard, it also leads to the issue of imperfect observability of that quality. If the quality of the revised manuscript happens to be above the journal’s quality standard, the journal generally cannot determine the actual level of quality achieved. In sum, the journal’s standard level of scientific quality introduces a limitation to the quality outcome of the review process. We call this phenomenon “quality censoring” in peer review. This reduces the reviewer’s motivation to work hard to increase the quality of the review outcome when such outcomes of high quality cannot be observed due to a journal’s limited standard. In this short communication, we show that the ignorance of quality censoring is behind a zero probability of payment for the reviewer. Keywords Peer review · Reviewer’s incentives · Moral hazard · Journal’s standard · Quality censoring
Introduction The literature has typically assumed that there are no quality improvement constraints in the review process. However, as any editor will attest, this is not true in many practical situations because quality improvement is restricted by the journal’s quality standard at the time a review outcome is achieved. This is especially true in second or third tier scientific journals, including some mega-journals that will publish pretty much anything. This is only possible because of mega-journals’ particular approaches to quality control, where articles are assessed based on their “scientific soundness” only. Consideration is not given * J. A. Garcia [email protected] 1
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e I. A., CITIC‑UGR, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
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Scientometrics
to an article’s novelty, importance or interest in relation to a particular subject community (Pinfield 2016). After the peer review process is completed, the quality of the revised manuscript is a random variable which depends on the reviewer’s assessment of the manuscript’s quality and the quality of the revision by the author. This is due to the fact that in the standard review process, the editors’ decisions on manuscripts depends on the judgments of the reviewers (Bornmann 2008, 2011). If from the expert assessment of the manuscript’s true worth it follows that the manus
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