Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)
EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 2. The Research on Refereeing and Alternatives in the Present System
16 GARFIELD: REFEREEING AND PEER REVIEW, PART 1 Authors Often Lack Knowledge of Publishing Editors also point out that authors frequently do not understand the publication process. For instance, many authors charge that referees make up a closed, "elite" group. Yet the number of active referees for a journal can far exceed the number of active contributors. 9 According to JAMA editor George D. Lundberg, that journal's list of active referees contains over 3,000 names. 1 0 The Journal of the Operational Research Society, a relatively small journal, used 285 referees in 1982 alone. 1 1 And a careful study of nine years of materials from the archives of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters by sociologists Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton, Columbia University, 1 2 showed that authors of every rank participated in the refereeing process. Their main finding, which is based on referee reports for both published and rejected manuscripts and which refutes another widely held belief, is that there is no consistent relationship between referee acceptance or rejection of manuscripts and the relative standing of authors and referees. 12 In addition, informed authors know that it is not referees, but editors, who are ultimately responsible for rejecting a manuscript. Bishop says that authors also show a lack of understanding when they point to differences of opinion among referees as evidence that the system is capricious and unreliable. 8 (p. 43-9) At the root of some of these reviewer disagreements, in Bishop's view, are differences in the algorithms and paradigms fundamental to every branch of science. For instance, referees less often disagree substantially in well-established fields. But in fields pressing at the frontiers of knowledge, significant differences of opinion among referees are bound to be more common. When editors are confronted with a decision between two equally plausible referee interpretations of a given manuscript, they often employ one of several options that range from publishing the paper without comment to publication of the controversial paper along with comments by referees, invited critics, and rebuttals by the authors. 8 (p. 43-9) Authors also seem to assume that their submissions are, in general, carefully written and based on substantial amounts of work. "Not so," asserts J. W. Cornforth, Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology, Sittingbourne Research Centre, Kent, UK, who served as a referee for a dozen journals over a 30-year period. 1 3 "In my experience," Cornforth continues in his letter to the editors of New Scientist, "a regrettably high proportion [of manuscripts] show careless or misleading presentation and meager experimental work, and the majority need some modification. Referees —and, of course, editors —almost invariably improve a paper that passes through their hands; often, they are doing what the authors ought to have done." 1 3 The Many Faces of Rejection Authors should also be aware that the scientific value of a paper is not necessarily the only factor that enters into editors' decisions to publish or not; many manuscripts never make it past the screening process that eliminates papers that are incompatible with a journal's readership or have not been submitted in the required format. 1 4 Or a journal may reject a manuscript simply because it has recently published another, similar paper, or has one currently under consideration. 1 0 Rejection rates are also significantly affected by the existence of page charges, which support publication and thus allow for much lower rejection rates. This practice is widespread in physics and chemistry but not unknown even in psychology. It is also important to realize that rejection rates vary. In their study of patterns of evaluation in science, Zuckerman and Merton compiled a table of the rejection rates for a sample of 83 journals in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. 1 2 Linguistics, geology, and physics journals had the lowest rate of rejection, turning down only 20
