Aliakbar Akbaritabar Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Dimity Stephen German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies
Source
via arXiv
DOI
Abstract
This paper provides insight into the changes manuscripts undergo during peer review, the potential reasons for these changes, and the differences between scientific fields. A growing body of literature is assessing the effect of peer review on manuscripts, however much of this research currently focuses on the social and medical sciences. We matched more than 6,000 preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields and quantified the changes in their reference lists.
We also quantified the change in references per full-text section for 565 pairs from PLOS journals. In addition, we conducted manual checks of a randomly chosen sample of 98 pairs to validate our results, and undertook a qualitative analysis based on the context of the reference to investigate the potential reasons for reference changes.
We found 10 disciplines, mostly in the natural sciences with high levels of removed references. Methods sections undergo the most relative change in the natural sciences, while in the medical and health sciences, the results and discussion sections underwent the most changes. Our qualitative analysis identified issues with our results due to incomplete preprint reference lists.
In addition, we deduced 10 themes for changing references during peer review. This analysis suggested that manuscripts in the natural and medical sciences undergo more extensive reframing of the literature used to situate and interpret the results of studies than the social and agricultural sciences, which are further embedded in the existing literature through peer review. Peer review in engineering tends to focus on methodological details. Our results are useful to the body of literature examining the effectiveness of peer review in fulfilling its intended purposes.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
The bill linked below was posted on September 29, 2023. From the Summary: Requires online sellers of books created wholly or partially with the use of generative artificial intelligence to ...
From the Video’s Description: Beloved reading advocate, writer, and television and film star LeVar Burton is leading this year’s Banned Books Week, which takes place October 1–7, 2023. He’s ready ...
Here’s the Full Text of a Release From PEN America: For Banned Books Week 2023, PEN America and We Believe gathered a consortium of the nation’s leading publishers, teacher and ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From The Charlotte Observer: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools quickly reversed a ban Friday on Banned Books Week events planned in schools. In an email to principals Friday afternoon, a CMS spokeswoman warned ...
From the Charleston City Paper: Librarians are learning the S.C. State Library in August quietly notified the national trade association for libraries that the state was not renewing its membership ...
From the Gillette News Record: Two months after she was fired and nearly two years after a criminal complaint was filed against her, former library director Terri Lesley is taking ...
From Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD): Today, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) reintroduced a Resolution recognizing Banned Books Week and condemning the escalating attacks on books and ...
From a SAGE News Release: Sage has launched a new collection of free-to-read research highlighting the effects of academic censorship on democracy, social-emotional learning, higher education, and more. Categories in ...
Here’s the Full Text of Today’s Annoucement From the University of Maryland Libraries: The University of Maryland Libraries announces the debut of a significant, newly digitized collection, making available online for the ...
From The New York Times: President Biden plans to announce on Thursday that he will devote federal money to create a new library and museum dedicated to his old friend ...