An Empirical Study on Roles and Their Information Correlations for Interdisciplinary Peer Reviewer

Abstract

Peer review has always been known as the gatekeeper for the academic quality of papers. Traditional peer review is mostly carried out in a singular discipline, while peer review for interdisciplinary scientific research must go across the boundaries of multiple disciplines, and there is a real opposition between disciplines ‘differentiation’ and ‘de-differentiation.’ Due to this opposition, the practice of interdisciplinary peer review has more research value. Through an empirical study using Publons data, this article introduces the role theory from sociology as a theoretical support, studies role characteristic information of interdisciplinary peer reviewers, extracts their roles, measures the gaps between the roles according to their correlations, and proposes countermeasures to narrow the gaps through role construction to improve the quality of peer review in general. Specifically, this study adopts the empirical analysis method to obtain the behavioural characteristics data of the reviewers in the top 1 per cent in Cross-Field of the Global Peer Review Awards in 2018 and 2019 from the Publons platform and uses the exploratory factor analysis method to extract the roles of the reviewers. Using structural equation modelling to fit the role information association model, the authors compare and analyse the data models of 2018 and 2019 by using the comparative analysis method. The results found are as follows: The ‘researcher’ role, ‘reviewer’ role, and ‘editor’ role are all positively correlated, and the correlations are getting higher. It indicates that the correlations between the three are getting stronger, which will make transitioning between roles less difficult.