Peer-to-Peer highlights a post on the pseudonymous FemaleScienceProfessor blog about the benefits (or lack thereof) of reviewing reviewer performance. FemaleScienceProfessor is also an editor for a journal. She writes: “I did a quick, statistically invalid analysis of the reviewer data for the past year to see whether the time it took a reviewer to complete the review was random or correlated with seniority. The quickest reviewing groups are the early-career and retired scientists.” More analysis and the reactions of some of her readers are provided at FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog post and comments section.
At the Nature journals, we do not publish reviewer statistics of this type, nor do we set out to capture information about factors such as reviewers’ gender or seniority level. Is there interest from our peer-reviewers and authors to know these sorts of statistics? Is the quickest review necessarily the ‘best’ review? What would be appropriate metrics? You can provide your thoughts by going to the Peer-to-Peer URL provided above.

Nature 448, xi; 26 July 2007