Identifying reviewers is argued to improve the quality and fairness of peer review, but is generally disfavoured by reviewers. To gain some insight into the factors that influence when reviewers are ...willing to have their identity revealed, I examined which reviewers voluntarily reveal their identities to authors at the journal
, at which reviewer identities are confidential unless reviewers sign their comments to authors. I found that 5.6% of reviewers signed their comments to authors. This proportion increased slightly over time, from 4.4% in 2003-2005 to 6.7% in 2013-2015. Male reviewers were 1.8 times more likely to sign their comments to authors than were female reviewers, and this difference persisted over time. Few reviewers signed all of their reviews; reviewers were more likely to sign their reviews when their rating of the manuscript was more positive, and papers that had at least one signed review were more likely to be invited for revision. Signed reviews were, on average, longer and recommended more references to authors. My analyses cannot distinguish cause and effect for the patterns observed, but my results suggest that 'open-identities' review, in which reviewers are not permitted to be anonymous, will probably reduce the degree to which reviewers are critical in their assessment of manuscripts and will differentially affect recruitment of male and female reviewers, negatively affecting the diversity of reviewers recruited by journals.
The management of patients with exsanguinating torso hemorrhage is challenging. Emergency surgery, with the occasional use of resuscitative thoracotomy for patient in extremis, is the current ...standard. Recent reports of REBOA (resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta) have led to discussions about changing paradigms in the management of patients in both civilian and military are nas. We submit that broad and liberal application of this technique is premature given the current data and in light of historical experience. We propose an algorithm for the management of patients with exsanguinating torso hemorrhage, as well as a set of research questions that we feel can help clarify the role of REBOA in modern trauma care in a variety of trauma settings.
Government policies attempting to slow the spread of COVID‐19 have reduced access to research laboratories and shifted many scholars to working from home. These disruptions will likely influence ...submissions to scholarly journals, and affect the time available for editors and reviewers to participate in peer review.
In this editorial we examine how journal submissions, and editorial and peer review processes, have been influenced by the pandemic at six journals published by the British Ecological Society (BES).
We find no evidence of a change in the geographic pattern of submissions from across the globe. We also find no evidence that submission of manuscripts by women has been more affected by pandemic disruptions than have submissions by men—the proportion of papers authored by women during the COVID period of 2020 has not changed relative to the same period in 2019.
Editors handled papers just as quickly, and reviewers have agreed to review just as often, during the pandemic compared to pre‐pandemic. The one notable change in peer review during the pandemic is that reviewers replied more quickly to emails inviting them to review (albeit only 4% sooner), and those who agreed to review returned their reviews more quickly (17% sooner), during the pandemic.
We thus find no evidence at these six ecology journals that submissions and peer review processes have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Also, contrary to analyses in other disciplines, we do not find evidence that there have been disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on female authors and reviewers.
There is substantial evidence that systemic biases influence the scholarly peer review process. Many scholars have advocated for double‐blind peer review (also known as double‐anonymous review) to ...reduce these biases. However, the effectiveness of double‐blind peer review in eliminating biases is uncertain because few randomized trials have manipulated blinding of author identities for journal submissions and those that have are generally small or provide few insights on how it influences reviewer biases.
In 2019, Functional Ecology began a large, randomized trial, using real manuscript submissions, to evaluate the various consequences of shifting to double‐blind peer review. Research papers submitted to the journal were randomly assigned to be reviewed with author identities blinded to reviewers (double‐blind review) or with authors identified to reviewers (single‐blind review). In this paper, we explore the effect of blinding on the outcomes of peer review, examining reviewer ratings and editorial decisions, and ask whether author gender and/or location mediate the effects of review type.
Double‐blind review reduced the average success of manuscripts in peer review; papers reviewed with author identities blinded received on average lower ratings from reviewers and were less likely to be invited for revision or resubmission. However, the effect of review treatment varied with the author's location.
Papers with first authors residing in countries with a higher human development index (HDI) and/or higher average English proficiency fared much better than those from countries with a lower HDI and lower English proficiency, but only when author identities were known to reviewers; outcomes were similar between demographic groups when author identities were not known to reviewers.
Blinding author identities had no effect on gender differences in reviewer ratings or editor decisions.
Our data provide strong evidence that authors from higher income and/or English‐speaking countries receive significant benefits (a large positive bias) to being identified to reviewers during the peer review process and that anonymizing author‐identities (e.g. double‐blind review) reduces this bias, making the peer review process more equitable. We suggest that offering optional blinding of author identities, as some journals allow, is unlikely to substantially reduce the biases that exist because authors from higher‐income and English‐speaking countries are the least likely to choose to be reviewed with their identity anonymized.
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摘要
大量证据表明系统性偏见会影响学术同行评议过程。许多学者提倡双盲同行评议(或称双重匿名评议)以减少这些偏见。 然而，双盲同行评议在消除偏见方面的有效性尚不清楚，因为极少有随机试验在期刊投稿过程中隐藏作者身份，且隐去身份的试验通常规模较小或很少提出双盲如何影响审稿偏见作用的见解。
2019 年，《Functional Ecology》杂志启动了一项大型随机试验，使用真实提交的稿件来评估双盲同行评议的各种影响。 在这个实验中，提交给期刊的研究论文被随机分配成双盲审稿(对审稿人不公开作者身份)或单盲审稿(对审稿人公开作者身份)。在本文中，我们探讨了上述处理对同行评议结果的影响，考察了审稿人评分和编辑决策，并询问了作者性别和/或背景(国别、工作单位等)是否会影响评议结果。
双盲评议降低了稿件在同行评议中的平均成功率；隐藏作者身份的论文审稿得到的评分较低，且不太可能被邀请进行修改或重新提交。然而，双盲评议的效果因作者背景而异。
如果第一作者居住在人类发展指数 (Human Development Index, HDI) 较高和/或平均英语水平较高的国家，其论文的表现比来自HDI较低和英语水平较低的国家的论文要好得多，但前提是审稿人知道作者的身份 ; 当审稿人不知道作者身份时，上述分组之间的结果相似。
在性别差异上，隐藏作者身份对审稿人评分或编辑决定没有影响。
我们的数据提供了强有力的证据，表明来自高收入和/或英语国家的作者，如果公开身份，在同行评议过程中表现出显著的益处(很大的正偏差)，隐匿作者身份(如双盲审)则减少了这种偏见，使同行评议过程更加公平。我们认为杂志提供隐藏作者身份的选项(正如一些杂志所作的那样)，不太可能显著减少已有的偏见，因为来自高收入和英语国家的作者最不可能选择匿名审阅。
Existe mucha evidencia de que sesgos sistémicos influyen en el proceso de revisión por pares académicos. Muchos académicos han apoyado la revisión por pares ‘doble ciego’ (también conocida como revisión doblemente anónima) para reducir estos sesgos. Sin embargo, la efectividad de la revisión por pares doble ciego en eliminar los sesgos es incierta porque pocos estudios han puesto a prueba sus efectos de forma sistematizada, y los que lo han hecho son generalmente pequeños o brindan poco conocimiento sobre cómo influye los sesgos de los revisores.
En 2019, Functional Ecology comenzó un gran ensayo aleatorio, utilizando envíos de manuscritos reales, para evaluar las diversas consecuencias del sistema doble ciego de revisión por pares. Los trabajos de investigación enviados a la revista se asignaron aleatoriamente para ser revisados con las identidades de los autores no disponibles para los revisores (revisión doble ciego) o con los autores identificados para los revisores (revisión simple ciego). En este artículo, exploramos el efecto del sistema de revisión por pares, examinando las calificaciones de los revisores y las decisiones editoriales, y preguntamos si el género y/o la ubicación del autor impactan la revisión.
La revisión doble ciego redujo el éxito promedio de los manuscritos en la revisión por pares; los artículos revisados con las identidades de los autores ocultadas recibieron en promedio calificaciones más bajas de los revisores y tuvieron menos probabilidades de ser invitados para revisión o reenvío. Sin embargo, el efecto del tratamiento de la revisión varió según la ubicación del autor.
Los artículos cuyos primeros autores residían en países con un índice de desarrollo humano (IDH) más alto y/o un dominio promedio del inglés más alto obtuvieron mejores resultados que los de países con un IDH más bajo y un dominio del inglés más bajo, pero solo cuando los revisores conocían las identidades de los autores. Los resultados fueron similares entre los grupos demográficos cuando los revisores no conocían las identidades de los autores.
El ocultamiento de las identidades de los autores no tuvo efecto sobre diferencias de género en las calificaciones de los revisores ni en decisiones de los editores.
Nuestros datos proporcionan pruebas sólidas de que los autores de países de mayores ingresos y/o de habla inglesa reciben beneficios significativos (un fuerte sesgo positivo) al ser identificados ante los revisores durante el proceso de revisión por pares, y que ocultar las identidades de los autores (p. ej. revisión ciega) reduce este sesgo, haciendo que el proceso de revisión por pares sea más equitativo. Sugerimos que es muy poco probable que ofrecer el sistema doble ciego de revisión de forma opcional, como lo permiten algunas revistas, reduzca sustancialmente los sesgos que existen porque los autores de países de habla inglesa y de ingresos más altos son los que tienen menos probabilidades de optar por esta alternativa.
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Effective management of the OR is critical in all clinical settings, where ensuring that policies, systems, staff members and teams are efficient, safe and cost-effective is paramount. Operating Room ...Leadership and Management is a comprehensive resource for physicians and administrators involved in the day-to-day management of operating rooms in a hospital setting or smaller-scale facilities. Topics include: • OR metrics • Scheduling • Human resource management • Leadership • Economics • IT management • Quality assurance • Recovery. This practical, evidence-based text is written by leaders in the field of OR management and is relevant to medical directors, administrators and managing physicians. Specific nursing considerations, preoperative patient evaluation, financial performance measures and pain clinic management are also discussed in detail. Operating Room Leadership and Management enables all OR managers to improve the efficiency and performance of their operating rooms.
The productivity and performance of men is generally rated more highly than that of women in controlled experiments, suggesting conscious or unconscious gender biases in assessment. The degree to ...which editors and reviewers of scholarly journals exhibit gender biases that influence outcomes of the peer‐review process remains uncertain due to substantial variation among studies. We test whether gender predicts the outcomes of editorial and peer review for >23,000 research manuscripts submitted to six journals in ecology and evolution from 2010 to 2015. Papers with female and male first authors were equally likely to be sent for peer review. However, papers with female first authors obtained, on average, slightly worse peer‐review scores and were more likely to be rejected after peer review, though the difference varied among journals. These gender differences appear to be partly due to differences in authorial roles. Papers for the which the first author deferred corresponding authorship to a coauthor (which women do more often than men) obtained significantly worse peer‐review scores and were less likely to get positive editorial decisions. Gender differences in corresponding authorship explained some of the gender differences in peer‐review scores and positive editorial decisions. In contrast to these observations on submitted manuscripts, gender differences in peer‐review outcomes were observed in a survey of >12,000 published manuscripts; women reported similar rates of rejection (from a prior journal) before eventual publication. After publication, papers with female authors were cited less often than those with male authors, though the differences are very small (~2%). Our data do not allow us to test hypotheses about mechanisms underlying the gender discrepancies we observed, but strongly support the conclusion that papers authored by women have lower acceptance rates and are less well cited than are papers authored by men in ecology.
Papers with female and male first authors were equally likely to be sent for peer review. However, papers with female first authors obtained, on average, slightly worse peer‐review scores and were more likely to be rejected after peer review, though the difference varies among journals.
Inbreeding–environment interactions occur when inbreeding leads to differential fitness loss in different environments. Inbred individuals are often more sensitive to environment stress than are ...outbred individuals, presumably because stress increases the expression of deleterious recessive alleles or cellular safeguards against stress are pushed beyond the organism's physiological limits. We examined inbreeding–environment interactions, along two environmental axes (temperature and rearing host) that differ in the amount of developmental stress they impose, in the seed-feeding beetle Collosobruchus maculatus. We found that inbreeding depression (inbreeding load, L) increased with the stressfulness of the environment, with the magnitude of stress explaining as much as 66% of the variation in inbreeding depression. This relationship between L and developmental stress was not explainable by an increase in phenotypic variation in more stressful environments. To examine the generality of this experimental result, we conducted a meta-analysis of the available data from published studies looking at stress and inbreeding depression. The meta-analysis confirmed that the effect of environment on inbreeding depression scale linearly with the magnitude of stress; a population suffers one additional lethal equivalent, on average, for each 30% reduction in fitness induced by the stressful environment. Studies using less-stressful environments may lack statistical power to detect the small changes in inbreeding depression. That the magnitude of inbreeding depression scales with the magnitude of the stress applied has numerous repercussions for evolutionary and conservation genetics and may invigorate research aimed at finding the causal mechanism involved in such a relationship.
Journal peer review relies on the willingness of researchers to volunteer their time to review manuscripts. However, editors often have difficulty recruiting reviewers, and this difficulty can vary ...quite substantially among manuscripts. This study examines whether the difficulty recruiting reviewers influences outcomes of the peer review process at six journals of ecology and evolution. The difficulty editors had recruiting reviewers varied substantially among papers, with editors successfully recruiting the first two people invited just 22% of the time, and being declined by two or more invitees for more than half (56%) of reviewed papers. Papers for which editors had more difficulty recruiting reviewers were more likely to be declined at all six journals, with an increase in the odds of acceptance ranging from a low of 3.5 ± 1.2% to a high of 17.3 ± 2.0% for each 10% increase in the proportion of reviewers agreeing to review. Papers for which editors had more difficulty recruiting reviewers were also reviewed less positively at all six journals, and this influence on review scores explained most but not all of the influence of recruitment difficulty on outcomes. Reviewers invited close together in sequence (without many declined invitations between them) were more consistent in the scores they submit than were reviewers invited more greatly separated in sequence, suggesting that editors recruit different kinds of reviewers early versus late in the reviewer invitation sequence. However, the scores submitted by later-recruited reviewers were not less predictive of the editor’s decision than were scores of early-recruited reviewers. The influence of reviewer recruitment difficulty on decisions, although of small effect, should be considered among the diversity of variables that influence outcomes of the editorial and peer review process at academic journals.
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