Addressing bias and knowledge gaps regarding race and ethnicity in neonatology manuscript review

Abstract

A recent shift in public attention to racism, racial disparities, and health equity have resulted in an abundance of calls for relevant papers and publications in academic journals. Peer-review for such articles may be susceptible to bias, as subject matter expertise in the evaluation of social constructs, like race, is variable. From the perspective of researchers focused on neonatal health equity, we share our positive and negative experiences in peer-review, provide relevant publicly available data regarding addressing bias in peer-review from 12 neonatology-focused journals, and give recommendations to address bias and knowledge gaps in the peer review process of health equity research.

How many submissions are needed to discover friendly suggested reviewers?

“…Although we can find publicly available data on peer-review results (e.g. [25,26])allowing to quantify potential biases based on factors such as prestige [27], gender [28][29][30], ethnicity [31,32], and place of origin [33,34]-this data is anonymized to protect the privacy of authors and reviewers. On account of this, it is not possible to track the submission history of a single author across multiple publication venues to determine whether they are biasing editorial decisons through their list of suggested reviewers.…”

Black women in medical education publishing: Bibliometric and testimonio accounts using intersectionality methodology

“…Moreover, publications are central sources of advancement and prestige. [4][5][6] Therefore, understanding their (in)equitable distribution is critical to making change. We center Black women's intersectional experiences using Intersectionality Methodology (IM), 24 developed by Black women scholars through analysis of intersectional studies of Black women.…”

“…14 Yet a growing body of literature in academic medicine suggests that Black women may have particularly difficult experiences with the publishing process. For instance, two recently published commentaries point to the vulnerability scholars of color may experience in the peer-review process: comments from reviewers may express bias when authors reveal their identity, 15 and this can lead Black women authors to feel like their story is "not good enough." 4(p145) Editorial leaders in medical education are starting to talk about and try to address the bias baked into the publishing process, 16,17 but we still know little about the actual representation of Black women in the medical education literature.…”

“…14 Yet a growing body of literature in academic medicine suggests that Black women may have particularly difficult experiences with the publishing process. For instance, two recently published commentaries point to the vulnerability scholars of color may experience in the peer-review process: comments from reviewers may express bias when authors reveal their identity, 15 and this can lead Black women authors to feel like their story is “not good enough.” 4(p145) Editorial leaders in medical education are starting to talk about and try to address the bias baked into the publishing process, 16,17 but we still know little about the actual representation of Black women in the medical education literature. We know a bit more about the overall state of Black women in science: a 2022 study of inequalities in scientific publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Black and Latine authors were underrepresented overall and that Black, Latine, and white women were underrepresented in the fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering and were more overrepresented in lower-cited fields.…”

“…3 Some Black women scholars are starting to speak out, specifically about their experiences of discrimination in academic publishing, a critical component of academic career progression. [4][5][6] Their stories argue for the experiential significance of this discrimination, but as a field steeped in quantitative methodologies and a postpositivist desire for generalizability, statistical significance is an important aspect of arguing for change. 7 Current literature has used quantitative methodologies to explore author gender, 8,9 but it has not done the same for race/racism (following Gilborn and colleagues, we are "ambivalent" about race: it has very real effects but they come through mechanisms of racism; we denote this by using these two words together).…”