Determinants of peer review engagement and quality in scientific journals: insights for academic research and the sustainability of the peer-review system

ABSTRACTResearch productivity is a common topic in the literature, but peer reviewing for journals has received less attention, although it is a key activity of academic research. We help to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the determinants of peer review engagement and quality in scientific journals. We do so by analysing the combined information from a survey of academics working in different parts of the world and various fields of science, along with their publication and peer review information gathered from Scopus and Publons/Web of Science. We find that age, gender, and some dimensions of academics' strategic research agendas are important predictors of peer review engagement. We also find that academic inbreeding along the educational path has a negative association with the quality of peer-review activities. However, we find no statistically significant results concerning academic inbreeding related to the professional trajectory and peer review engagement and quality. Equally importantly, our results suggest that although the activities of publishing and peer reviewing are closely associated, peer review tends to be ancillary to publishing, rather than the other way around. Furthermore, the greater the perceived availability of resources, including research funding throughout an academic's career, the greater the focus is on publishing and the less the focus is on peer reviewing. These findings are discussed in relation to the current valuation of publication versus peer reviewing in terms of scientific and academic career recognition.KEYWORDS: Peer review–publication nexusstrategic research agendasacademic researchacademic inbreedingpeer review Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Superchi and colleagues (Citation2019) identified five overlapping domains across the three dimensions of research of writing papers, publishing skills and peer review quality. The domains they identified were the relevance of the study, the originality of the study, the interpretation of the study results, the strengths and weaknesses of the study and the presentation and organisation of the manuscript.2 Academic inbreeding refers to the practice of universities hiring their own PhD graduates right after graduation, and it reflects career immobility; we also consider 'silver-corded' academics – those who obtained their PhD at one university, then worked elsewhere, and now work at the first university (Horta Citation2022).3 Strategic research agendas are defined as an academic's strategic preferences on how to pursue research goals and thematic focuses. Although they are intrinsically personal, they are also influenced by the academic's environment (Santos and Horta Citation2018).4 A complementary explanation is that research funding often comes with publication deliverables in a relatively short span of time (funding for projects tend to last 3 to 4 years) which may create pressure for academics to publish, leaving them less time for peer review.5 An argument could be put forth that paper to review ratios that are skewed in favour of reviews are a result of academics finding publishing difficult; however, our model controls for individual track records, so this is not the case.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: [Grant Number 2020.03729.CEECIND]; Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee: [Grant Number 17602223].