Evaluated articles

This article provides a brief history and review of peer review. It evaluates peer review models against the goals of scientific communication, expressing a preference for publish, review, curate (PRC) models. The review and history are useful. However, the article’s progression and arguments, along with what it seeks to contribute to the literature need refinement and clarification. The argument for PRC is under-developed due to a lack of clarity about what the article means by scientific communication. Clarity here might make the endorsement of PRC seem like less of a foregone conclusion.

The authors present a descriptive analysis of preprint review services. The analysis focuses on the services’ relative characteristics and differences in preprint review management. The authors conclude that such services have the potential to improve the traditional peer review process. Two metaresearchers reviewed the article. They note that the background section and literature review are current and appropriate, the methods used to search for preprint servers are generally sound and sufficiently detailed to allow for reproduction, and the discussion related to anonymizing articles and reviews during the review process is useful. The reviewers also offered suggestions for improvement. They point to terminology that could be clarified. They suggest adding URLs for each of the 23 services included in the study. Other suggestions include explaining why overlay journals were excluded, clarifying the limitation related to including only English-language platforms, archiving rawer input data to improve reproducibility, adding details related to the qualitative text analysis, discussing any existing empirical evidence about misconduct as it relates to different models of peer review, and improving field inclusiveness by avoiding conflation of “research” and “scientific research.”

The reviewers and I agree that the article is a valuable contribution to the metaresearch literature related to peer review processes.

In this article the authors use a discrete choice experiment to study how health and medical researchers decide where to publish their research, showing the importance of impact factors in these decisions. The article has been reviewed by two reviewers. The reviewers consider the work to be robust, interesting, and clearly written. The reviewers have some suggestions for improvements. One suggestion is to emphasize more strongly that the study focuses on the health and medical sciences and to reflect on the extent to which the results may generalize to other fields. Another suggestion is to strengthen the embedding of the article in the literature. Reviewer 2 also suggests to extend the discussion of the sample selection and to address in more detail the question of why impact factors still persist.