Gender differences among active reviewers: an investigation based on publons

Abstract

Peer review of scientific manuscripts before publication is essential in scholarly publishing, and most active researchers hold relationships with a number of journals as both an author and a reviewer. There have been several studies focusing on gender balance in academic research and authorship, but fewer studies on our role as reviewers. Publons is a commercial website run by Clarivate Analytics that allows researchers to track and verify their peer review activities and be recognized for it. The platform features over 2 million researchers and 6.9 million reviews for more than 5,000 partnered journals, listing the most active reviewers as “top reviewers”. Our study focuses on gender representation in this ‘top reviewer’ group while also looking at the countries, regions and research fields they represent, as well as the relationship between their roles as authors and reviewers. The results show that male reviewers dominate in almost all countries, regions, and research fields. Male reviewers generally contribute to review work more frequently than females; however, female reviewers write longer reviews. The correlations between reviewing activity and research activity are generally weak overall and within specific research fields. This may reflect that active reviewers are not necessarily the most productive researchers in their fields. What clearly emerges from our results is the need for more concern over gender representation in the quality assurance and gatekeeping functions of scholarly publishing.