Analysis of peer reviewers’ response to invitations by gender and geographical region: cohort study of manuscripts reviewed at 21 biomedical journals before and during covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Objectives To describe gender and geographical inequalities in invitations to review and the response to these invitations and to assess whether inequalities increased during the covid-19 pandemic. Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting 19 specialist medical journals and two large general medical journals from BMJ Publishing Group. Population Reviewers invited to review manuscripts submitted between 1 January 2018 and 31 May 2021. The cohort was followed up to 28 February 2022. Main outcome measures Reviewer’s agreement to review. Results A total of 257 025 reviewers were invited (38.6% (88 454/228 869) women), and 90 467 (35.2%) agreed to review. Invited reviewers were mainly (217 682; 84.7%) affiliated with high income countries: Europe (122 414; 47.6%), North America (66 931; 26.0%), Africa (25 735; 10.0%), Asia (22 693; 8.8%), Oceania (16 175; 6.3%), and South America (3076; 1.2%). Independent factors associated with agreement to review were gender (odds ratio 0.89, 95% confidence interval 0.87 to 0.92, for women compared with men), geographical affiliation (2.89, 2.73 to 3.06, for Asia; 3.32, 2.94 to 3.75 for South America; 1.35, 1.27 to 1.43, for Oceania; and 0.35, 0.33 to 0.37, for Africa compared with Europe), and country income (0.47, 0.45 to 0.49, for upper middle income; 5.12, 4.67 to 5.61, for lower middle income; and 4.66, 3.79 to 5.73, for low income compared with high income country). Agreement was also independently associated with editor’s gender (0.96, 0.93 to 0.99, for women compared with men), last author’s geographical affiliation (0.80, 0.78 to 0.83, for Asia; 0.89, 0.85 to 0.94, for Oceania compared with Europe), impact factor (1.78, 1.27 to 2.50, for >10 compared with <5), and type of peer review process (0.52, 0.35 to 0.77, for open compared with anonymised). During the first and second phases of the pandemic, agreement was lower than in the pre-pandemic period (P<0.001). The interaction between time periods and covid-19 related topic and reviewer’s gender was non-significant. However, significant interaction was found between time periods and covid-19 related topic and reviewer’s geographical affiliation. Conclusions To reduce bias and improve diversity, editors need to identify and implement effective strategies and continually evaluate progress against these to ensure that more women and researchers from upper middle income and low income countries are involved in review.

Assessment of gender and geographical bias in the editorial decision-making process of biomedical journals: A Case-Control study

“…In the absence of self-identified data from authors, we determined gender as binary and by doing so may have misrepresented people with diverse gender identities. However, we applied a four step sequential procedure already implemented in our two previous works (12,16) and used the threshold accuracy of gender determination above 60% for our primary analysis. Our three sensitivity analyses using higher threshold accuracies for gender determination and multiple imputation to replace missing gender data were in line with our original results.…”

“…More crucially, it may also result in a lack of representation of patients and populations requiring prevention and care. (15,16) The determinants and implications of lower acceptance of manuscripts from Asia, and from low-income countries need to be further explored. Our finding of a positive effect on publication acceptance of geographically and gender diverse teams has been demonstrated by others.…”

Peer Review and Scientific Publication at a Crossroads

“…We have accumulated a large body of empirical evidence on how systems function and how they can malfunction. There is also growing evidence on how to make peer review, publication, and dissemination processes more efficient, fair, open, transparent, reliable, and equitable . Experimental randomized evaluations of peer review practices are only a small part of the literature, but their numbers have been growing since the early trials of anonymized peer review .…”

Peer review and scientific publication at a crossroads

“…We have accumulated a large body of empirical evidence on how systems function and how they can malfunction. Evidence is also growing on how to make peer review, publication, and dissemination processes more efficient, fair, open, transparent, reliable, and equitable 6789101112131415…”