Are scientific editors reliable gatekeepers of the publication process?

By Richard B. Primack, Danielle Descoteaux, Vincent Devictor, Laurent Godet and Lucy Zipf, via Elsevier.



The scientific community assumes the publication process is reliable and fair, with the best papers being published only after rigorous review. Scientific editors act as “gatekeepers” in this publishing process, deciding whether a paper is even sent out for peer review, or alternatively “desk rejected”, that is returned to the author without peer review. While the review process has been extensively investigated - for example to determine reviewer consistency, and whether reviewers exhibit gender bias - as far as we know, the topic of editor consistency has never been experimentally examined. Do editors make arbitrary decisions on which papers to send out for review and which ones to desk reject? Or is there consistency in what editors decide to do?

We addressed these questions in respect of manuscripts submitted to the journal Biological Conservation, and the results of our study were recently published in the journal. We are reasonably confident, however, that the results are likely to apply to other scientific journals.

Overall, we found that editors are reasonably consistent in their decisions to send a paper out for review, or to desk reject it, and that they agreed with past decisions. However, disparities in agreement with decisions reveal the unsurprising subjectivity editors bring to the process. We are pleased that this study has demonstrated a significant degree of consistency in the peer review system in the area of editorial decision-making, but we see some room for improvement. One way in which we believe the process could be reinforced is by encouraging editors to seek the opinion of one or two additional editors before making a decision on papers that are not obvious candidates for either review or rejection. Whilst this would slow down the decision process for these papers, it seems reasonable that doing so would add an additional layer of rigor to the decision-making.


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