With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing

dc.contributor.authorLortie, Christopher
dc.contributor.authorAllesina, Stefano
dc.contributor.authorAarssen, Lonnie
dc.contributor.authorGrod, Olyana
dc.contributor.authorBudden, Amber
dc.date.accessioned2014-01-20T18:13:07Z
dc.date.available2014-01-20T18:13:07Z
dc.date.issued2013-12-30
dc.description.abstractPeer review is an important element of scientific communication but deserves quantitative examination. We used data from the handling service manuscript Central for ten mid-tier ecology and evolution journals to test whether number of external reviews completed improved citation rates for all accepted manuscripts. Contrary to a previous study examining this issue using resubmission data as a proxy for reviews, we show that citation rates of manuscripts do not correlate with the number of individuals that provided reviews. Importantly, externally-reviewed papers do not outperform editor-only reviewed published papers in terms of visibility within a 5-year citation window. These findings suggest that in many instances editors can be all that is needed to review papers (or at least conduct the critical first review to assess general suitability) if the purpose of peer review is to primarily filter and that journals can consider reducing the number of referees associated with reviewing ecology and evolution papers.
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work was conducted as part of the “Role of publication-related biases in ecology” Working Group supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a Center funded by NSF (grant #DEB- 0072909). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Publication was made possible by the York University Libraries' Open Access Author Fund.en
dc.identifier.citationLortie CJ, Allesina S, Aarssen L, Grod O, Budden AE (2013) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing. PLoS ONE 8(12): e85382. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085382en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/27012
dc.identifier.uri10.1371/journal.pone.0085382
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherPLoS ONEen
dc.publisherPLoS ONEen_US
dc.relation.ispartofseriesPLoS ONE;8(12)
dc.relation.ispartofseriesYork University Libraries' Open Access Author Fund
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
dc.rights.article10.1371/journal.pone.0085382en
dc.rights.journalhttp://www.plosone.org/en_US
dc.rights.publisherhttp://www.plosone.org/en
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ca/*
dc.rights.uriAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
dc.titleWith Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishingen
dc.typeArticleen

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