We divided the journals in three tiers: (i) the flagship interdisciplinary journal (Nature), (ii) the discipline-specific sister journals (Nature Astronomy, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Chemistry, Nature Climate Change, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Energy, Nature Genetics, Nature Geoscience, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Immunology, Nature Materials, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Microbiology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics, Nature Plants, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology), and (iii) the open-access interdisciplinary title (Nature Communications). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0049-z, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0049-z. Our results show that we cannot say that there is a significant difference between authors from prestigious institutions and authors from less prestigious institutions for DBPR-accepted manuscripts. Decision Sent to Author 2020-07-09 08:38:16 Decision Pending 2020-06-29 08:28:42 Under Review 2020-06-25 09:38:03 Under Editorial Consideration 2020-06-23 10:09:56 Manuscript Submission 2020-04-09 14:44:05 Stage Start Date Manuscript Ready for Publication 2020-07-16 10:45:24 . 0000007420 00000 n Title page: A separate title page is necessary and should bear a) the title of the article, b) name of the authors, c) the institutions of origin, d) a short title and for Short Communications also the corresponding author's name, address, and e-mail.Please note that it should be a maximum of 5 authors for Short Communications. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. As a co-author, i saw recently that our paper switched from status. Using Pearsons chi-square test of independence, we found a significant and large association between country category and review type (2=3784.5, df=10, p value <0.001; Cramers V=0.189). The study was designed to analyse the manuscripts submitted to Nature-branded journals publishing primary research between March 2015 (when the Nature-branded primary research journals introduced DBPR as an opt-in service) and February 2017. 8. nature1. We considered using citations as a proxy for the quality of published papers; however, this would have limited the dataset to the small number of published articles that have had time to accrue citations, given the low acceptance rate of the journals considered, and the fact that the dataset is recent in relation to when DBPR was introduced at the Nature journals. In order to test whether the proportions in different groups were the same, we used the test of equal proportions in R (command prop.test). This is public, and permanent. We are a world leading research, educational and professional publisher. Nature. isolera golv plintgrund waiting to send decision to author nature. In order to see whether author uptake could be accurately predicted based on author and journal characteristics, we attempted to fit logistic regression models to the data. New submissions that remain Incomplete more than 90 days will be removed. In order to see if institutional prestige played a role in the choice of review type by authors, we analysed the uptake by institution group for the entire portfolio. If you want to find out more about when to expect a decision from the Editor, click here. California Privacy Statement, The status of the manuscript says 'Reviewers Assigned' for about 24 days. Corrected proofs returned by author 5. 0000012316 00000 n We found that 10 countries contributed to 80% of all submissions, and thus, we grouped all other countries under the category Others. Once all author information has been resolved and extraneous or incorrect information removed, the system will guide you to the Manuscript Information tab. We investigated any potential differences in uptake depending on the journal tier. Our main question concerns a possible gender bias; therefore, we investigated the relation between OTR rates, review model, and gender, still including both direct submissions and transfers (Table8). editors waits for him to send his comments then they contact the author and make a decision on the basis of these reports and send you acceptance, rejection or revision based on their reports . Regarding institutional bias, a report of a controlled experiment found that SBPR reviewers are more likely than DBPR reviewers to accept manuscripts from famous authors and high-ranked institutions [15], while another report found that authors at top-ranked universities are unaffected by different reviewing methods [16]. The aims of this study are to analyse the demographics of corresponding authors choosing double-blind peer review and to identify differences in the editorial outcome of manuscripts depending on their review model. Papers. In order to assign a measure of institutional prestige to each manuscript, we used the 2016/2017 Times Higher Education rankings (THE [20]) and normalised the institution names using the GRID API. These results suggest that the choice of DBPR may be linked with a higher perceived risk of discrimination, with the exception of gender discrimination. Help Us Celebrate Legal Talent. Editors need to identify, invite and get (often two or more) reviewers to agree to review. The available data cannot tell us if other factors, such as the quality of the work, play a role in the choice of the review model. Our commitment to early sharing and transparency in peer review inspires us to think about how to help our authors in new ways. As mentioned in the Methods section, we have used a commercial algorithm to attribute gender based on first names, and discarded records that could not be matched with accuracy greater than 80%. authors opting for DBPR should not post on preprint archives). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1988. The data that support the findings of this study are available from Springer Nature but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. In spite of the presence of explicit instructions to authors, this type of review model has sometimes been shown to fail to hide authors identity. Terms and Conditions, 0000065294 00000 n You can useIn Reviewto access up-to-date information on where your article is in the peer review process. Plast Reconstr Surg. Controlled experiments as described above were not possible due to peer review policies at the Nature journals and the fact that we could only analyse historical data. 0000009854 00000 n PLOS ONE. A study analysing 940 papers submitted to an international conference on economics held in Sweden in 2008 found no significant difference between the grades of female- and male-authored papers by review type [12]. No, Modified on: Mon, 26 Jul, 2021 at 6:04 PM. https://www.grid.ac. Finally, editors need to assess these reviews and formulate a decision. We decided to exclude the gender values NA and we observed a significant but very small difference in the acceptance rate by gender (Pearsons chi-square test of independence: 2=3.9364, df=1, p value=0.047; Cramers V=0.015), leading us to conclude that manuscripts by female corresponding authors are slightly less likely to be accepted. Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Cookie Settings. PubMedGoogle Scholar. This can potentially skew our results if, for example, there are differences in the proportion of names that cannot be attributed between genders. Renee Wever. As described above, Nature Portfolio has produced the 2-year Median in the table below. Times Higher Education - World University Rankings. This may be due to the higher quality of the papers from more prestigious institutions or to an editor bias towards institutional prestige, or both. Search. China and the USA stand out for their strong preference for DBPR and SBPR, respectively. . We decided to exclude the NA entries for gender and tested the null hypothesis that the two populations (manuscripts by male corresponding authors and manuscripts by female corresponding authors) have the same OTR rate within each of the two review models. We also performed logistic regression modelling with author update, out-to-review, and acceptance as response, and journal tier, author gender, author country, and institution as predictors. Accessed 15 Jan 2017. You have completed the submission and approval steps, and the article has been submitted to the journal. Journals can customize the wording of status terms. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years. Let us suggest an alternative journal within our esteemed publishing portfolio for resubmitting your manuscript (and any reviewer comments) for fast, effortless publication. The present study focusses on the effects of this publisher intervention in the 2years following implementation and can guide others when evaluating the consequences of introducing DBPR to their journals. Data are collected annually for full calendar years. 0000009876 00000 n . Table11 displays the accept rate by review type defined as the number of accepted papers over the total number of accepted or rejected papers. The area of each rectangle is proportional to the difference between observed and expected frequencies, where the dotted lines refer to expected frequencies. R-CAPTCHA. Each review is due in ten days, and many of them do arrive in two weeks. Falagas ME, Zouglakis GM, Kavvadia PK. Ben Glocker (an expert in machine learning for medical imaging, Imperial College London), Mirco Musolesi (a data science and digital health expert, University College London), Jonathan Richens (an expert in diagnostic machine learning models, Babylon Health) and Caroline Uhler (a computational biology expert, MIT) talked to Nature Communications about their research interests in causality . Finally, editors need to assess these reviews and formulate a decision. EDR proposed the study and provided the data on manuscript submissions and the gender data from Gender API. Because the median is not subject to the distortions from outliers, we have developed and provided the 2-year Median, derived from Web of Science data and defined as the median number of citations received in 2021for articles published in 2019and 2020. Thank you for visiting nature.com. We did not observe gender-related differences in uptake. We studied whether papers were accepted or rejected following peer review, and we included transfers because the editorial decisions as different journals follow different criteria. Here, we included data on direct submissions and transfers (101,209 submissions). Double anonymity and the peer review process. . The multivariate regression analyses we performed led to uninformative models that did not fit the data well when the response was author uptake, out-to-review decision, or acceptance decision, and the predictors were review type, author gender, author institution, author country, and journal tier. Usage: This means that there is a statistically significant difference between the three groups. Locate the submission in Submission Requiring Author Approval or Revisions Requiring Author Approval, and see here for more details. This can be due to quality or referee bias. In a systematic review and meta-analysis of biomedical journals investigating the interventions aimed at improving the quality of peer review in these publications, the authors reported that DBPR did not affect the quality of the peer review report or rejection rate [4]. If we compare the proportion of accepted manuscripts under DBPR and authored by female vs. male corresponding authors (26 vs. 25%) with a test for equality of proportions with continuity correction, we find that there is a not a significant difference in female authors and male authors for DBPR-accepted papers (results of two-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction: 2=0.03188, df=1, p value=0.8583). We would like to thank Michelle Samarasinghe for the help in collecting the data from the manuscript tracking system and Sowmya Swaminathan for the comments on the study and feedback on the manuscript draft. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1707323114. Get Scientific Editing. ISSN 2041-1723 (online). This may be due to editor bias towards the review model, to a quality effect (authors within each institution group choose to submit their best studies under SBPR), or both. Paginate and make available the correction notice in the online issue of the journal. 0000007398 00000 n We should note that the significance of the results on outcome is limited by the size of the dataset for accepted papers, due to the high selectivity of these journals and to the low uptake of DBPR. "This is an extension of the wisdom-of-crowds theory that allows us to relax the assumption that being in big groups is always the best way to make a . As needed, the journal editors may also ask the committee to provide opinions on the policies and procedures of the journals. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01102.x. Journal-integrated preprint sharing fromSpringer Nature and Research Square, Share your preprint and trackyour manuscripts review progress with ourIn Review service. The target number of required reviews has been completed, and the Handling Editor is considering the reviews. Press J to jump to the feed. However, when they communicated their decision to the Editor-in-Chief (EiC), who makes the final decision, it was decided to reconsider your manuscript. When analysing uptake data by journal tier, we have included both direct submissions and transfers incoming to each journal group, for a total of 128,457 manuscripts that were submitted to one of the 25 Nature-branded journals. Another report found that the authors of submissions to the American Journal of Public Health were in fact recognizable in around half of the cases [3]. The results were significant for all pairs: group 1 vs. group 2 (2=15.961, df=1, p value <0.001); group 2 vs. group 3 (2=7.1264, df=1, p value=0.0227); and group 1 vs. group 3 (2=37.304, df=1, p value <0.001). Example: Blood Cancer Journal: Go to the 'Publish with us' drop down menu: Click on 'Submit manuscript' in order to be directed to that journal's manuscript tracking system: For the status of your submission to Scientific Reports,go to the Scientific Reports contact webpage for email addresses to determine which one best fits your requirements. We found that DBPR papers that are sent to review have an acceptance rate that is significantly lower than that of SBPR papers. This first-of-its-kindoption, called In Review, brought to you by our partners at Research Square, makes it easy to share a preprint of your manuscript on the Research Square platform andgives you real time updates onyour manuscripts progress through peer review. decision sent to author nature communications posted by Manuscript then goes into said editor's pile, and waits until it gets to the front of the line. ,.,., . We note here that, in recent years, trends in scholarly publishing have emerged that strongly propose transparent, or open, peer review as a model that could potentially improve the quality and robustness of the peer review process [18].