The State of Science. Marc Zimmer

puzzle pieces are published in them. Getting a paper published in one of these journals assures the authors of a wide readership and significant prestige, and in turn the reader knows that the papers have withstood rigorous peer review and have been judged to be of importance to all scientists. The “impact factor” of a journal (the annual average number of citations per paper published in the journal in the previous two years) is an attempt to quantify its prestige. (The 2018 impact factor for Science was 41.1, which means that the average paper published in Science in 2015 or 2016 was mentioned in 41.1 papers in 2017. The parallel impact factor for Nature was 41.6, almost the same.) Publishing one’s work in the journal with the highest impact factor is important and something of an art. Being too ambitious in journal shopping leads to rejections and delays, while taking the safer route and submitting to a journal with a lower impact can lead to less of the needed exposure and prestige that parlay into grants, jobs, tenure, and fellowships.

      Nature receives about 200 manuscripts a week but can publish no more than 8 percent of them. Upon receiving a manuscript, a staff editor with expertise in the area covered by the paper makes a first cut and within a week decides whether the paper should be sent for external review or be returned to the authors.^[4]

      In the next step, Science and Nature, like most other science journals, use a single-blind peer-review system to evaluate their manuscripts. The papers are sent to at least two external referees, who also have expertise in the research area covered in the paper. In the single-blind process the reviewers know who wrote the paper, but the authors never officially find out the identity of the outside experts (although journals have begun experimenting with giving reviewers the option of signing off on their reviews). Science, despite its huge expanse of subjects, can still lead to remarkably small circles of experts, especially given how highly specialized and specific certain subjects can be. As a result, it’s often not out of the question that researchers could accurately guess who their reviewers are. This single-blind process creates some problems of bias against women (see chapter 2) and in favor of well-known researchers from prestigious academic institutions.^[5]

      Peer review is not new; it has been around for at least 350 years. Henry Oldenburg (1618–1677), the editor of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, may have been the first editor to use the system. Since the 1960s the number of journals has ballooned, and the need for impartial experts capable of reviewing scientific manuscripts has grown. Peer review is done on a voluntary basis; academics are not compensated for the reviews they write. The majority of scientists see this process as pivotal to scientific progress, and as such they are willing to volunteer their time to peer review. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are all happy with the process as it stands. More than 200,000 academics track and verify their peer reviews on a website called Publons. In 2018, the service analyzed the million-plus reviews conducted for the 25,000 journals in its database and conducted “The Global State of Peer Review” survey of more than 11,000 researchers.^[6] It found that most editors are from “leading science locations” such as the United States, Europe, and Japan, and that they tend to look for reviewers in their own backyards. Consequently, researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, and so forth write nearly two peer reviews for each manuscript they have submitted, whereas researchers from countries such as China, Brazil, India, and South Africa do about 0.6 review per submission. Reviewers from “emerging economies” are more likely to agree to review a paper. Their reviews are returned more promptly but are shorter. Only 4 percent of journal editors are from “emerging economies.” It takes about five hours to write a review, which means that each year scientists spend about 68.5 million hours reviewing papers without compensation from for-profit publishers. The average review is returned in 16.5 days and is 477 words long. The unpaid cost of peer review in 2008 was estimated to be $3.5 billion.^[7]