Background

The process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.

Methods

We evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.

Results

Overall, 12% (179) of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% (611) contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques (IIUC).

Conclusions

The large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review.

中文翻译：

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量化同行评审的专业性

背景

学术界的同行评审过程招致了围绕偏见、公平和专业性问题的批评；然而，此类评论出现的频率尚不清楚。

方法

我们评估了来自“生态与进化”和“行为医学”领域的 1491 组审稿人评论，其中 920 条来自在线评论存储库 Publons，571 条来自六位早期职业研究人员。评论集是根据我们已发表的研究使用先前的标准对“不专业评论”和“不完整、不准确或未经证实的批评”的出现进行编码的。结果以绝对数字和百分比表示。

结果

总体而言，12% (179) 的评论集至少包含一项针对作者或其作品的非专业评论，41% (611) 的评论集包含不完整、不准确的未经证实的批评 (IIUC)。

结论

大量不专业的评论和 IIUC 观察到的可能会加剧调查人员的心理困扰，特别是那些处于职业生涯早期阶段的调查人员。我们建议，制定并遵守普遍认可的审稿人行为准则对于提高同行评审的质量和专业经验是必要的。