Inside Higher Ed: New Test for Bias in Peer Review
Peer review is supposed to assure fair consideration of scholars’ work for placement in journals, the awarding of grants and so forth. But many have their doubts and believe that fairness is much more theory than practice. Many scientists say in fact that incompetence and bias hinder the peer review process.
Andrew J. Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, has proposed a new way to test for bias. His system and some tests of it are outlined in a paper he wrote for the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. While the system proposed is primarily a tool for looking at how journals rank articles, and he did the testing with his own field, economics, Oswald argues that it could be applied to other disciplines and avoids some of the pitfalls of other systems for detecting possible bias.
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