{"id":3630,"date":"2018-02-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pl-asapbio.local\/siegel-review\/"},"modified":"2025-03-28T21:38:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T21:38:08","slug":"siegel-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/siegel-review\/","title":{"rendered":"In support of journal-agnostic review"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vivian Siegel<\/em><\/p>\n

In my own experience, and I\u2019ve written about this in the past<\/a>, peer review in the context of journal submission suffers from a number of biases. These include journal-based biases that would be eliminated by a journal agnostic process. I summarize the main points below.<\/p>\n

We all know reviewers are biased (why? Because we\u2019re human).<\/p>\n

We\u2019re biased based on our own history \u2013 how our own experiments have led to our view of the way a particular phenomenon works \u2013 and are much more skeptical of experiments that go against our views than we are of those that align with them. To the editors who expect a controversial paper to be enthusiastically endorsed by reviewers on both sides of the controversy: good luck.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are also biased based on the success or failure of our own journal submissions, and on our preconceptions of \u201cwhat the journal wants\u201d. When I was an editor at Cell<\/em>, I quickly realized that many reviewers would be more critical of papers in their field if they had recently had a paper rejected from Cell<\/em> than if they had a paper accepted.<\/p>\n

But even beyond that, we are biased by what we think the journal wants to publish. Ben Lewin told me that when he decided to include structural biology in Cell<\/em>, it took him years before reviewers would review the paper without providing the knee-jerk \u201cthis is not a Cell<\/em> paper; you don\u2019t publish structures\u201d response. I experienced it when we started publishing short papers (\u201cCell<\/em> doesn\u2019t publish short papers\u201d), and we\u2019ve all seen reviews where the reviewer simply says \u201cThis isn\u2019t a [INSERT JOURNAL NAME OF YOUR CHOICE] paper \u2013 it\u2019s not mechanistic enough or trendy enough, or long enough, or [SOMETHING] enough.\u201d It\u2019s easy to dismiss a paper when we think we know what the journal wants.<\/p>\n

In contrast, I found time and again that when a journal is new (and I\u2019ve helped launch several journals, including Molecular Cell<\/em>, Developmental Cell<\/em>, PLOS Biology<\/em>, and Disease Models & Mechanisms<\/em>), peer reviews would take on a different quality. Reviewers would write something like, \u201cI don\u2019t know how to advise you because I don\u2019t know what your standards are or what you want in the journal, so I guess I\u2019ll just tell you the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and you will have to decide.\u201d (Thank you, this is all I ever wanted). At the same time, authors would remark that the reviews were unusually constructive \u2013 whether we chose to accept or reject the paper. These are anecdotal observations, and I would love to collect some data on the quality of review when you don\u2019t know journal identity.<\/p>\n

Back in my days as a journal editor, not many biologists were posting preprints, so my idea was to create a \u201cjournal blind\u201d submission system during standard peer review. But with BioRxiv and other preprint servers, performing peer review in advance of journal publication becomes possible. I encourage the community to try it, gather some data, and proceed based on evidence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Vivian Siegel In my own experience, and I\u2019ve written about this in the past, peer review in the context of journal submission suffers from a number of biases. These […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-posts","category-peer-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}