Is Review By Peers As Fair As It Appears

Abstract

Recent research shows that journal reviewing practices are neither objective nor fair. I propose a procedure to increase the likelihood of publishing important papers. This will be tested by Interfaces for a year. Suppose the following study were conducted: One hundred previously published papers are selected from highly prestigious journals in various areas of management science. Each has been published by a researcher at a prestigious University. The articles are disguised by using fictitious names for the authors and the institutions. In addition, cosmetic changes are made to prevent the article from being identified (change of title, revisions in abstract and introductions, changing tables to graphs and vice versa), but the content is not changed. After checks to ensure that there have been no major changes in the editorial policy, each article is then resubmitted to the same journal where it was published two or three years earlier. Assume that these journals do not routinely conceal the names of authors from referees and that the journals typically use two referees. What predictions would you make for: 1) the percentage of the papers (out of the 100 resubmitted) that would be detected as having been previously published?

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