Which review aspect has a greater impact on the duration of open peer review in multiple rounds? —Evidence from Nature Communications

Abstract

Purpose

Peer review plays a crucial role in scientific writing and the publishing process, assessing the quality of research work. As the volume of paper submissions increases, peer review becomes increasingly burdensome, highlighting the importance of studying the duration of peer review. This study aims to explore the correlation between review aspect sentiment and the duration of peer review as well as the differences in this relationship across different disciplines and review rounds. Thus helping authors make targeted revisions and optimizations to their papers while reducing the duration of peer review, which enables authors’ research findings to reach the academic community and public domain more rapidly.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employs a two-step approach to understand the impact of review aspects on the duration of peer review. First, it extracts fine-grained aspects from peer review comments and uses sentiment classification models to classify the sentiment of each review aspect. Then, it conducts a correlation analysis between review aspect sentiment and the duration of peer review. Additionally, the study calculates sentiment scores for various review rounds to explore the differences in the impact of review aspect sentiment on the duration of peer review across different review rounds.

Findings

The study found that there is a weak but significant negative correlation between the sentiment of the review and the duration of peer review. Specifically, the aspect clusters, such as Evaluation & Result and Impact & Research Value, exhibit a relatively stronger correlation with the duration of peer review. Additionally, the correlation between review aspect sentiments and the duration of peer review varies significantly in different review rounds.

Originality/value

The significance of this study lies in connecting peer review comments text with the peer review process. By analyzing the correlation between review aspects and the duration of peer review, it identifies aspects that have a greater impact on the duration of peer review. This helps improve the efficiency of peer review from the perspectives of authors, reviewers and editors. Thus alleviating the burden of peer review and accelerating academic exchange and knowledge dissemination.

Citation

Zhou, H., Han, R., Zhong, J. and Zhang, C. (2024), "Which review aspect has a greater impact on the duration of open peer review in multiple rounds? —Evidence from Nature Communications", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2024-0158