A new global study from IOP Publishing (IOPP) has found that certain peer review communities continue to feel overburdened by reviewer requests, while others remain underrepresented.
The survey, which generated over 3,000 responses from peer reviewers from across the globe, revealed regional and career-stage disparities:
• 30% of reviewers from high-income countries indicated that they receive too many peer review requests, compared with just 10% from low and middle-income countries.
• Just 6% of respondents from China and 7% from India indicated that they receive too many requests, compared with 23% of respondents globally.
• 28% of senior researchers say they receive too many requests, compared to just 7% of PhD students and 9% of postdocs.
Other findings from the survey show that just over half of reviewers (52%) prefer to review double-anonymous manuscripts where the identity of both authors and reviewers are concealed. IOPP introduced this approach in 2021 to tackle the significant gender, racial and geographical under-representation in the scholarly publishing process. The predominant peer review approach in the physical sciences hitherto has been single-anonymous.
IOPP’s ‘State of peer review 2024’ report provides rich and practical insights that will help improve the efficiency and quality of the peer review process.
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