Ching-Han Kuo
DISAPEER: The reconfiguration of peers in editorial review
Institute for Science in Society, Faculty of Science, Radboud University
Supervisors: Dr. Willem Halffman, Dr. Serge Horbach
Background
Starting from studying Advertising (BA) and working in retail marketing, I then did my first master’s in Human-Computer Interaction (MSc), where I shifted my interest to be more specific on consumer behaviour. After several years working as a research executive in market research and as an audience data analyst in media, I continued pursuing my second master’s in Digital Humanities (MSc) to study how to integrate cutting-edge AI techniques into sociological research.
Content
Journal peer review faces concerns of efficiency, reviewer shortages, as well as substantial concerns for the quality and transparency of the scientific literature. These concerns are closely connected with transformative editorial developments. First, publishers are increasingly deploying automation and artificial intelligence in the administration and screening of submissions, such as with reviewer selection tools or plagiarism scanners. Second, interdisciplinary research cooperation complicates the identification of relevant experts. Third, the open science movement has led to more open peer review, including post-publication review and public review reports.
The project “DISAPEER: The reconfiguration of peers in editorial review” investigates how these developments affect the configuration of reviewers in the editorial process: who is identified as a relevant reviewer, and what are these reviewers expected to do? Peer review is influenced by automated reviewer suggestions, submission pre-processing through scanners, the challenges of interdisciplinarity, and the economics of publishing, but the precise consequences are unclear and subject to constant change. The project proposes to investigate the changes in peer review through content and social network analyses, ethnographic studies of editorial processes, and qualitative interviews with actors involved in reviewing. It fosters collaboration between pertinent experts at Humboldt University and Radboud University Nijmegen.
As one of the researchers in the DISAPEER project, I focus on exploiting quantitative text mining and social network analysis to explore these transformative developments in scholarly peer review mechanisms. Specifically, my study involves scientometrics analysis and quantitative text analysis on peer review reports and reviewers’ metadata. These analyses will assess how the tone, length, content and timeliness of review reports vary across different peer review models. In addition, network analysis will be conducted to assess how the transformative developments shape reviewer communities and social networks.
