Negotiation on the assessment of research articles with academic reviewers: application of peer-review approach of teaching

This study provides an insight into the dominant negotiation processes that occur between the authors of research articles and academic reviewers at the peer reviewing stage. Data of reviewers comments and authors responses on 32 science and engineering based journal articles covering four decision categories (accept as is, accept with minor revisions, major revisions and reject) were collected. A commonly practised peer-review approach in teaching was applied to analyse the data and to identify the key negotiation attributes, their frequency of occurrence, authors’ reaction and approach to negotiate with the reviewers. Six main negotiation attributes were identified. Technical quality was the most frequent (31% of all instances) attracting mixed reactions from the authors. The remaining attributes constituted suggestion (20%), explanation (20%), restatement (15%), grammar (13%) and structure (~1%). With the exception of ‘explanation’ where authors had to counteract to clear misunderstood concepts or contents by the reviewers, the other attributes were of highly collaborative nature and were willingly accepted by the authors. All these negotiations were found to help authors in improving the overall quality, clarity and readability of their manuscripts, besides forcing them to rethink about unclear contents. The negotiation trends emerged here can help the academic researchers to improve the quality of their articles before submission to the peer-reviewed journals. It can also provide a link through which their classroom teaching experience involving supervision of peer review negotiations among students can be utilised in writing their research articles and negotiating with academic reviewers

Profit (p)-Index: The Degree to Which Authors Profit from Co-Authors

Current metrics for estimating a scientist’s academic performance treat the author’s publications as if these were solely attributable to the author. However, this approach ignores the substantive contributions of co-authors, leading to misjudgments about the individual’s own scientific merits and consequently to misallocation of funding resources and academic positions. This problem is becoming the more urgent in the biomedical field where the number of collaborations is growing rapidly, making it increasingly harder to support the best scientists. Therefore, here we introduce a simple harmonic weighing algorithm for correcting citations and citation-based metrics such as the h-index for co-authorships. This weighing algorithm can account for both the nvumber of co-authors and the sequence of authors on a paper. We then derive a measure called the ‘profit (p)-index’, which estimates the contribution of co-authors to the work of a given author. By using samples of researchers from a renowned Dutch University hospital, Spinoza Prize laureates (the most prestigious Dutch science award), and Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine, we show that the contribution of co-authors to the work of a particular author is generally substantial (i.e., about 80%) and that researchers’ relative rankings change materially when adjusted for the contributions of co-authors. Interestingly, although the top University hospital researchers had the highest h-indices, this appeared to be due to their significantly higher p-indices. Importantly, the ranking completely reversed when using the profit adjusted h-indices, with the Nobel laureates having the highest, the Spinoza Prize laureates having an intermediate, and the top University hospital researchers having the lowest profit adjusted h-indices, respectively, suggesting that exceptional researchers are characterized by a relatively high degree of scientific independency/originality. The concepts and methods introduced here may thus provide a more fair impression of a scientist’s autonomous academic performance