Abstract
With the volume of manuscripts submitted for publication growing every year, the deficiencies of peer review (e.g. long review times) are becoming more apparent. Editorial strategies, sets of guidelines designed to speed up the process and reduce editors’ workloads, are treated as trade secrets by publishing houses and are not shared publicly. To improve the effectiveness of their strategies, editors in small publishing groups are faced with undertaking an iterative trial-and-error approach. We show that Cartesian Genetic Programming, a nature-inspired evolutionary algorithm, can dramatically improve editorial strategies. The artificially evolved strategy reduced the duration of the peer review process by 30%, without increasing the pool of reviewers (in comparison to a typical human-developed strategy). Evolutionary computation has typically been used in technological processes or biological ecosystems. Our results demonstrate that genetic programs can improve real-world social systems that are usually much harder to understand and control than physical systems.
Highlights
Peer reviewed publications remain the cornerstone of the scientific world [1,2,3,4,5], despite the fact that the review process itself is far from perfect: The authors are frustrated by having to wait for the delaying reports [6, 7] and the editors are irritated by the time-consuming tasks of searching for and rounding up an excessive number of reviewers in the hope of receiving one or two reports
The effective number of reviewers and the review time are calculated by averaging the results of simulations of the review process of ten thousand articles per one batch size
With the help of Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) equipped with the aforementioned fitness function, we searched for evolved strategies that would be better than strategies conceived by humans
Summary
Peer reviewed publications remain the cornerstone of the scientific world [1,2,3,4,5], despite the fact that the review process itself is far from perfect: The authors are frustrated by having to wait for the delaying reports [6, 7] and the editors are irritated by the time-consuming tasks of searching for and rounding up an excessive number of reviewers in the hope of receiving one or two reports. The editorial strategies are sets of rules that tell the editors how many new invitations they should issue at the beginning of the process and how many they should issue each time one review threads ends.
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