Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation

This paper reviews the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review published since 1975. The author concludes that these studies show that peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, structured rating sheets, open peer review, results-blind review, and in particular, electronic publication.