Retraction Watch publishes an interview with Raphael Didham, editor of Insect Conservation and Diversity, on the problems of recruiting peer reviewers. This is particularly interesting – and amusing:
Retraction Watch: You talk about the current problem of “zero-sum” reviewing. Could you define that in the context of the scientific peer review system?
Raphael Didham: … Many scientists are inherently ‘analytical’ people, and naturally gravitate towards accountable metrics of performance. In a zero-sum game, researchers could quantify the minimum effort required to resolve the ‘reviewer debt’ owed when they publish one of their own papers, simply by calculating the number of reviews received per paper (k) divided by the number of coauthors per paper (n). This simple formula, Sk/n, seems disarmingly ‘objective’ and superficially ‘fair’ in apportioning obligation – but actually holds a number of inherent biases that are having an unduly negative effect on reviewer willingness to review.
RW: Why is “zero-sum” reviewing such a problem in science publishing today?
RD: We believe that a growing philosophy of ‘zero-sum’ reviewing is one of the factors contributing to the increasing difficulty in finding willing reviewers these days. What this does is create a bottleneck in manuscript processing, and growing delays in the publication of new research.
For scientists who are accustomed to subtlety, such a gross approach and lack of forethought is slightly shocking. As Raphael points out, there’s a lot more on the positive end of the scale than just … numbers. The problem may lie in the current general Western Civ attitudes towards anything – or, as I once retorted to my fencing coach, I’m part of the Instant Gratification Generation! But here’s Raphael’s far more measured response:
Readers should reflect on the reasons why they are doing science in the first place, and take a moment to consider the genuine competitive advantage they can gain in their career from receiving an advance preview of new developments in the field before they are even published. Peer review provides a low-cost synthesis of how up to date you yourself are with current literature, a benchmark of comparative performance with other researchers in the field, and the opportunity to shape the conceptual and technical direction of your field through critical feedback.
