ArticlePloS one2016
Peer Review Quality and Transparency of the Peer-Review Process in Open Access and Subscription Journals.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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
31 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Paying peer reviewers: benefits, risks, and challenges.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Review
- Does the disconnect between the peer-reviewed label and reality explain the peer review crisis, and can open peer review or preprints resolve it? A narrative review.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Review
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- Examining uncertainty in journal peer reviewers' recommendations: a cross-sectional study.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- How can meta-research be used to evaluate and improve the quality of research in the field of traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine?Integrative medicine research · 2024Article
- Scientific Publication Speed of Korean Medical Journals during the COVID-19 Era.Healthcare informatics research · 2024Article
- Academia's responses to crisis: A bibliometric analysis of literature on online learning in higher education during COVID-19.British journal of educational technology : journal of the Council for Educational Technology · 2022Review
- Peer review analyze: A novel benchmark resource for computational analysis of peer reviews.PloS one · 2022Article
- How do Clarivate Analytics and Publons propose to fortify peer review in the COVID-19 era?Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences · 2021Article
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- Peer review guidance: a primer for researchers.Reumatologia · 2021Article
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- Article
- Predatory journals: a major threat in orthopaedic research.International orthopaedics · 2019Review
- Is Biomedical Research Protected from Predatory Reviewers?Science and engineering ethics · 2019Article
- The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Demography of Medical Journals in Iran; a Cross-Sectional Study.Advanced journal of emergency medicine · 2019Article
- Negative Effects of "Predatory" Journals on Global Health Research.Annals of global health · 2018Review
- Collective Conversational Peer Review of Journal Submission: A Tool to Integrate Medical Education and Practice.Annals of neurosciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRecent controversies highlighting substandard peer review in Open Access (OA) and traditional (subscription) journals have increased the need for authors, funders, publishers, and institutions to assure quality of peer-review in academic journals. I propose that transparency of the peer-review process may be seen as an indicator of the quality of peer-review, and develop and validate a tool enabling different stakeholders to assess transparency of the peer-review process. METHODS AND
findingsBased on editorial guidelines and best practices, I developed a 14-item tool to rate transparency of the peer-review process on the basis of journals' websites. In Study 1, a random sample of 231 authors of papers in 92 subscription journals in different fields rated transparency of the journals that published their work. Authors' ratings of the transparency were positively associated with quality of the peer-review process but unrelated to journal's impact factors. In Study 2, 20 experts on OA publishing assessed the transparency of established (non-OA) journals, OA journals categorized as being published by potential predatory publishers, and journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Results show high reliability across items (α = .91) and sufficient reliability across raters. Ratings differentiated the three types of journals well. In Study 3, academic librarians rated a random sample of 140 DOAJ journals and another 54 journals that had received a hoax paper written by Bohannon to test peer-review quality. Journals with higher transparency ratings were less likely to accept the flawed paper and showed higher impact as measured by the h5 index from Google Scholar.
conclusionsThe tool to assess transparency of the peer-review process at academic journals shows promising reliability and validity. The transparency of the peer-review process can be seen as an indicator of peer-review quality allowing the tool to be used to predict academic quality in new journals.
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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.