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This study aimed to identify the characteristics of excellent peer reviewers by using Publons.com (an open and free online peer review website).

Reviewers of the clinical medicine field on Publons were selected as the sample (n = 1,864). A logistic regression model was employed to examine the data.

The results revealed that reviewers' verified reviews, verified editor records, and whether they were the Publons mentors had significant and positive associations with excellent peer reviewers, while their research performance (including the number of articles indexed by Web of Science (WOS), citations, H-index and high-cited researcher), genders, words per review, number of current/past editorial boards, whether they had experiences of post-publication review on Publons and whether they were Publons academy graduates had no significant associations with excellent peer reviewers.

This study could help journals find excellent peer reviewers from free and open online platforms.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0604.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of the post-publication peer review (PPPR) polarity of a paper to that paper's citation count.

Papers with PPPRs from Publons.com as the experimental groups were manually matched 1:2 with the related papers without PPPR as the control group, by the same journal, the same issue (volume), the same access status (gold open access or not) and the same document type. None of the papers in the experimental group or control group received any comments or recommendations from ResearchGate, PubPeer or F1000. The polarity of the PPPRs was coded by using content analysis. A negative binomial regression analysis was conducted to examine the data by controlling the characteristics of papers.

The four experimental groups and their corresponding control groups were generated as follows: papers with neutral PPPRs, papers with both negative and positive PPPRs, papers with negative PPPRs and papers with positive PPPRs as well as four corresponding control groups (papers without PPPRs). The results are as follows: while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model, papers that received neutral PPPRs, those that received negative PPPRs and those that received both negative and positive PPPRs had no significant differences in citation count when compared to their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs). Papers that received positive PPPRs had significantly greater citation count than their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs) while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model.

Based on a broader range of PPPR sentiments, by controlling many of the confounding factors (including the characteristics of the papers and the effects of the other PPPR platforms), this study analyzed the relationship of various polarities of PPPRs to citation count.