Chataway, J;
Severin, A;
(2020)
Purposes of peer review: A qualitative study of stakeholder expectations and perceptions.
Learned Publishing
10.1002/leap.1336.
(In press).
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Abstract
Stakeholders might have diverging or conflicting expectations about the functions that peer review should fulfil. We aimed to explore how stakeholder groups perceive peer review and what they expect from it. We conducted qualitative focus group workshops with early‐, mid‐, and senior career scholars, editors, and publishers. We recruited participants following a purposive maximum variation sampling approach. To identify purposes of peer review, we conducted a thematic analysis. Stakeholders expected peer review (1) to assess the contributions of a manuscript, (2) to conduct quality control, (3) to improve manuscripts, (4) to assess the suitability of manuscripts for a journal, (5) to provide a decision‐making tool for editors, (6) to provide feedback by peers, (7) to curate a community, and (8) to provide a seal of accreditation for published articles. Stakeholders with different roles and tasks in the peer review process differed in the value they attached to the functions of peer review. Early‐ and mid‐career researchers valued social and feedback functions of peer review, while senior career researchers and editors expected it to instead perform a technical assessment of manuscripts and serve as a decision‐making tool. Publishers expected peer review to assess the suitability of manuscripts for their journals and to provide a seal of accreditation. This revealed a potential tension between functions of peer review. Stakeholder expectations are shaped by how stakeholders perceive their own roles both in relation to the peer review process and within their scientific community.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Purposes of peer review: A qualitative study of stakeholder expectations and perceptions |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1002/leap.1336 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2020 The Authors. Learned Publishing published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of ALPSP ‐ The Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Peer review, scholarly publishing, quality control, focus groups, academic journal, science studies |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > STEaPP |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10110911 |
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