ArticlePloS one2016
The Global Burden of Journal Peer Review in the Biomedical Literature: Strong Imbalance in the Collective Enterprise.
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 52 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
52 citing papers in PubMed.
- The power of peers.The European journal of general practice · 2026Article
- God save the reviewer! Reviewing science in the age of AI.European journal of pediatrics · 2026Article
- From rejection to formative development: recalibrating decisions for under-resourced authors.ESMO real world data and digital oncology · 2026Review
- From shadow AI to accountable assistance: a framework for level 2 AI-supported peer review in medical journals.Japanese journal of radiology · 2026Article
- Large Language Models and the Future of Peer-Reviewed Medical Publishing: Challenges, Editorial Responses, and a Framework for Responsible Integration.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Review
- The Invisible Architect: A Letter to CVIR Reviewers.Cardiovascular and interventional radiology · 2026Article
- Recognizing excellence in peer review.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- Susceptibility of large language models to hidden nudge injection during simulated medical peer review: a quasi-experimental study.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- Narrative Reviews in Contemporary Medical Literature: An Overview of Current Role and Relevance.Cureus · 2026Review
- Recognizing excellence in peer review.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Paying peer reviewers: benefits, risks, and challenges.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Review
- Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- 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
- An Interpretable Soft-Sensor Framework for Dissertation Peer Review Using BERT.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- The inevitable future of peer review: Human and AI integrated peer review system.Pakistan journal of medical sciences · 2025Article
- Peer Review in the Artificial Intelligence Era: A Call for Developing Responsible Integration Guidelines.Nature and science of sleep · 2025Article
- Reviewer Engagement Trends at a Journal: Cause for Concern.PRiMER (Leawood, Kan.) · 2025Article
- Messing with Merton: The intersection between open science practices and Mertonian values.Accountability in research · 2024Article
- A structured, journal-led peer-review mentoring program enhances peer review training.Research integrity and peer review · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The growth in scientific production may threaten the capacity for the scientific community to handle the ever-increasing demand for peer review of scientific publications. There is little evidence regarding the sustainability of the peer-review system and how the scientific community copes with the burden it poses. We used mathematical modeling to estimate the overall quantitative annual demand for peer review and the supply in biomedical research. The modeling was informed by empirical data from various sources in the biomedical domain, including all articles indexed at MEDLINE. We found that for 2015, across a range of scenarios, the supply exceeded by 15% to 249% the demand for reviewers and reviews. However, 20% of the researchers performed 69% to 94% of the reviews. Among researchers actually contributing to peer review, 70% dedicated 1% or less of their research work-time to peer review while 5% dedicated 13% or more of it. An estimated 63.4 million hours were devoted to peer review in 2015, among which 18.9 million hours were provided by the top 5% contributing reviewers. Our results support that the system is sustainable in terms of volume but emphasizes a considerable imbalance in the distribution of the peer-review effort across the scientific community. Finally, various individual interactions between authors, editors and reviewers may reduce to some extent the number of reviewers who are available to editors at any point.
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.