184 | Demystifying the Scientific Process in Neuropsychology (Part 2): The Peer Review Process – A Conversation With Dr. Steven Paul Woods

So very directly, going off of the last question, a major issue in peer review is the time it takes.

So we want to incentivize peer review, part of which is inherent in some of the advantages you mentioned.

Also, if we can create good external incentives for peer review, I think that makes sense because...

It is increasingly difficult to find peer reviewers.

And then we can get into this very extensive process of trying to get a paper published.

It can take years sometimes, believe it or not, to go from a fully written, high quality manuscript to the final published product.

The main problem, like I say, is that it's just hard to find peer reviewers.

Many people are overworked, which can lead the process to drag out for months and months.

I have a paper now that just hit its one year anniversary from first submission.

It's a very straightforward paper with positive reviews and just journals vary.

And that's a lot, as you had mentioned earlier, Stephen, there's heterogeneity and everything.

The turnaround time, one journal to the next can be very, very different.

So do you have any structural or procedural ideas? In addition to, I liked your suggestion that people try to peer review as many papers as they have received peer reviews so that it's equitable.

Anything beyond that?

I think from the editorial side, it's just such a challenge to identify reviewers.

We've had papers that I've sent out 30 invitations before finding two people to agree to review it.

And peer review itself... is getting a bad rap recently.

So it's clearly been under attack, which may be due in part to the rise in the number of journals and published articles, which have placed added demands on the network of reviewers.

And there's some evidence to suggest that a very small proportion of the reviewers do a very large proportion of the actual reviews.

So there's a subset of reviewers that are getting particularly burdened by this.

And many people are cutting down on and even boycotting peer review work.

So it's a major challenge.

And we're doing a couple of things at neuropsychology to help balance that challenge in finding reviewers, but also understanding that speed is important for people in receiving comments on a paper and keeping momentum on scientific topics.

The first is that we're trying not to oversample reviewers.

So we're only securing two to three reviewers per paper.