ArticleF1000Research2015
Personal attributes of authors and reviewers, social bias and the outcomes of peer review: a case study.
Article in F1000Research, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2023Pooled it
- Peer review perpetuates barriers for historically excluded groups.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Trial
- Gender differences in submission behavior exacerbate publication disparities in elite journals.eLife · 2026Article
- Perceptions of Arab researchers regarding publishing scientific research: A cross-sectional study.Accountability in research · 2026Article
- Fishing reviewing: A threat to research integrity and credibility.World journal of methodology · 2025Article
- Reviewer training for improving grant and journal peer review.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2023Article
- Bias Amplification in Gender, Gender Identity, and Geographical Affiliation.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2022Article
- Inequity in Peer Review in Communication Sciences and Disorders.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2022Article
- Article
- Publication bias is the consequence of a lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion.Journal of vascular surgery · 2021Article
- Knowledge syntheses in medical education: Meta-research examining author gender, geographic location, and institutional affiliation.PloS one · 2021Article
- Gender differences in peer review outcomes and manuscript impact at six journals of ecology and evolution.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Social behavioural epistemology and the scientific community.Journal of genetics · 2017Article
- Bias in cervical total disc replacement trials.Current reviews in musculoskeletal medicine · 2017Review
- The Influence of Peer Reviewer Expertise on the Evaluation of Research Funding Applications.PloS one · 2016Article
- Emerging trends in peer review-a survey.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Peer review is the "gold standard" for evaluating journal and conference papers, research proposals, on-going projects and university departments. However, it is widely believed that current systems are expensive, conservative and prone to various forms of bias. One form of bias identified in the literature is "social bias" linked to the personal attributes of authors and reviewers. To quantify the importance of this form of bias in modern peer review, we analyze three datasets providing information on the attributes of authors and reviewers and review outcomes: one from Frontiers - an open access publishing house with a novel interactive review process, and two from Spanish and international computer science conferences, which use traditional peer review. We use a random intercept model in which review outcome is the dependent variable, author and reviewer attributes are the independent variables and bias is defined by the interaction between author and reviewer attributes. We find no evidence of bias in terms of gender, or the language or prestige of author and reviewer institutions in any of the three datasets, but some weak evidence of regional bias in all three. Reviewer gender and the language and prestige of reviewer institutions appear to have little effect on review outcomes, but author gender, and the characteristics of author institutions have moderate to large effects. The methodology used cannot determine whether these are due to objective differences in scientific merit or entrenched biases shared by all reviewers.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.