Peer review perpetuates barriers for historically excluded groups

Abstract

w reviewer homophily. These analyses leverage data from 31 studies, which cumulatively examined 312,740 manuscripts submitted to >640 journals-including Nature Portfolio journals, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our dataset represents 4,529,971 author position/demographic/review stage interactions, which upon publication will be the largest publicly available dataset of this kind for future work to build upon. Finally, we describe the current landscape of peer review in the subfields of ecology and evolution by collecting peer review policy data from the websites of 541 journals. Altogether, we find that author demographics predict review outcomes; clear, evidence-based solutions to alleviate review bias are lacking; and relatively few journals are pro-actively combatting bias. Results and discussion Disparate peer review outcomes by author demographicsWe found evidence for disparate peer review outcomes for all demographics that we examined at one or more stages in the review process (Supplementary Tables 3-40). We found the most data on outcomes by author assumed gender (Supplementary Data 1). Assumed female authors had worse or similar outcomes compared with assumed male authors, depending on the author position and review stage (Fig. 2).We found notably lower success throughout the review process for authors with institutional affiliations in Asia, in countries where English is not a primary language and in countries with lower Human Development Indices (HDI; Figs. 2 and 3). Compared with authors with affiliations located in Europe, North America and Oceania, authors with affiliations located in Asia had the most consistent disparities, but authors in Latin America and Africa also often had worse review outcomes. When considering a country's continent, language and HDI

Distribution of Female and Male First and Last Authorship across Drug Delivery Related Journals with Respect to Year and Journal Impact Factor

“…Peer review has also been reported as a barrier for historically excluded groups, including women. When peer review data was recently analyzed from 312,740 manuscripts in biological sciences, they reported that female authors had worse or similar outcomes at each step of the review than male authors …”

“…Our data indicates that the representation of females in academia and as mentors for female trainees can improve authorship outcomes; however, our noted discrepancy around gender differences and authorship is often amplified in other underrepresented groups. For instance, it is well observed that differences related to author ethnicity and affiliation affect representation across publications . One way to mitigate this for gender, ethnicity, and LGBTQ+ status is to create a greater sense of inclusion .…”

“…A majority of the journals that publish drug delivery research are only single-blinded, where the authors are blinded as to who performed the peer review. Smith et al recently reported that for biological sciences, a higher percentage of female manuscripts was submitted for review when the manuscripts were double-blinded (authors and reviewers blinded) than when they were single-blinded . A recent analysis of double-blinded peer review studies by Kern-Goldberger et al concluded mixed results with this type of peer review.…”

“…When peer review data was recently analyzed from 312,740 manuscripts in biological sciences, they reported that female authors had worse or similar outcomes at each step of the review than male authors. 21 One way to mitigate bias may be double-blinded peer review where the author and peer reviewers are blinded to each other's name and thereby gender. A majority of the journals that publish drug delivery research are only single-blinded, where the authors are blinded as to who performed the peer review.…”

Toward the advancement of equity in scientific publishing.

“…Providing journal data and conducting these types of analyses will allow editorial boards and journal readers to understand how, where, and in what ways underrepresentation occurs and is affecting progress toward equity in scientific publishing. Of note, there are other strategies to enhance representation in the peer review process that are worthy of conversation and consideration (see Smith et al, 2023, for a review of such considerations), including fully unblinded reviews or, alternatively, double- or triple-blinded reviews (Tóth, 2020), and requiring positionality statements in all publications (Jafar, 2018).…”