Dataset Information

Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Open peer review practices are increasing in medicine and life sciences, but in social sciences and humanities (SSH) they are still rare. We aimed to map out how editors of respected SSH journals perceive open peer review, how they balance policy, ethics, and pragmatism in the review processes they oversee, and how they view their own power in the process.

Methods

We conducted 12 pre-registered semi-structured interviews with editors of respected SSH journals. Interviews consisted of 21 questions and lasted an average of 67 min. Interviews were transcribed, descriptively coded, and organized into code families.

Results

SSH editors saw anonymized peer review benefits to outweigh those of open peer review. They considered anonymized peer review the "gold standard" that authors and editors are expected to follow to respect institutional policies; moreover, anonymized review was also perceived as ethically superior due to the protection it provides, and more pragmatic due to eased seeking of reviewers. Finally, editors acknowledged their power in the publication process and reported strategies for keeping their work as unbiased as possible.

Conclusions

Editors of SSH journals preferred the benefits of anonymized peer review over open peer and acknowledged the power they hold in the publication process during which authors are almost completely disclosed to editorial bodies. We recommend journals to communicate the transparency elements of their manuscript review processes by listing all bodies who contributed to the decision on every review stage.

SUBMITTER: Karhulahti VM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8598274 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities.

Karhulahti Veli-Matti VM Backe Hans-Joachim HJ

Research integrity and peer review 20211118 1

<h4>Background</h4>Open peer review practices are increasing in medicine and life sciences, but in social sciences and humanities (SSH) they are still rare. We aimed to map out how editors of respected SSH journals perceive open peer review, how they balance policy, ethics, and pragmatism in the review processes they oversee, and how they view their own power in the process.<h4>Methods</h4>We conducted 12 pre-registered semi-structured interviews with editors of respected SSH journals. Interview ...[more]

PMID: 34789331

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Project description:BackgroundPrevious research has not provided enough direction regarding effective content design of courses integrating the humanities and social sciences in medical and dental education. This study aims at exploring how an Integrated Medical/Dental Humanities-Social Medicine/Dentistry course may be designed; how effective it may be in terms of student growth in knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations; and associated factors.MethodsThe course was designed by distilling commonalities in the international standards for medical/dental education proposed by seven major health organizations. This analysis resulted in a curriculum covering nine major topics: history, professionalism, communication, ethics, management, policy, insurance, law, and research methodology. During the 2017 calendar year, data was collected and statistically analyzed from 68 third-year pre-doctoral students enrolled in the resulting MDHS 13-week course.ResultsParticipants showed growth in skills, aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes, with the greatest change occurring in skills, then aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes. Knowledge growth was the only variable significantly related to student achievement of course objectives (β = 0.635, t (63) = 3.394, p = 0.001). The topics that students perceived as most critical were insurance, policy, management, and law. The perceived importance of research was most common among participants and was significantly related to all learning outcomes (For knowledge, β = 0.213, t (63) = 2.203, p = 0.031; for attitudes, β = 0.784, t (63) = 10.257, p = 0.000; for skills, β = 0.769, t (63) = 9.772, p = 0.000; and aspirations β = 0.639, t (63) = 7.595, p = 0.000).ConclusionsThis study proposed a framework for humanities-social sciences education in health sciences education and analyzed its implementation. The empirical evaluation of its effectiveness and factors related to successful outcomes found that students perceived gains in their knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations for humanistic and social aspects of dentistry/medicine. In addition, their recognition of the importance of research was associated with the greatest growth in all four learning outcomes. This study may contribute to the improved design of integrated humanities-social sciences courses.

Project description:PurposeRecent calls to improve transparency in peer review have prompted examination of many aspects of the peer-review process. Peer-review systems often allow confidential comments to editors that could reduce transparency to authors, yet this option has escaped scrutiny. Our study explores 1) how reviewers use the confidential comments section and 2) alignment between comments to the editor and comments to authors with respect to content and tone.MethodsOur dataset included 358 reviews of 168 manuscripts submitted between January 1, 2019 and August 24, 2020 to a health professions education journal with a single blind review process. We first identified reviews containing comments to the editor. Then, for the reviews with comments, we used procedures consistent with conventional and directed qualitative content analysis to develop a coding scheme and code comments for content, tone, and section of the manuscript. For reviews in which the reviewer recommended "reject," we coded for alignment between reviewers' comments to the editor and to authors. We report descriptive statistics.Results49% of reviews contained comments to the editor (n = 176). Most of these comments summarized the reviewers' impression of the article (85%), which included explicit reference to their recommended decision (44%) and suitability for the journal (10%). The majority of comments addressed argument quality (56%) or research design/methods/data (51%). The tone of comments tended to be critical (40%) or constructive (34%). For the 86 reviews recommending "reject," the majority of comments to the editor contained content that also appeared in comments to the authors (80%); additional content tended to be irrelevant to the manuscript. Tone frequently aligned (91%).ConclusionFindings indicate variability in how reviewers use the confidential comments to editor section in online peer-review systems, though generally the way they use them suggests integrity and transparency to authors.

Dataset Information

Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities.

Similar Datasets

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