Peer Review in Legal journals

Abstract

Legal scholarship has an ambiguous identity, somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences, having features in common with both. It shares many of the characteristics of social sciences since the law is a social phenomenon, but when normativity and legal certainty are concerned, legal scholarship is probably closer to humanities (Peruginelli & Faro, 2018). At the same time law is distinct from both. There is an interesting debate on the role of academic legal research in which consideration is given to 'law as a practical discipline', 'law as humanities' and 'law as social sciences' (Siems & Mac Sithigh, 2012). Because of the peculiarities of legal scholarship, it is not easy to assess legal journals according to the standard quantitative metrics applied in social sciences, and qualitative assessment of the published content is more appropriate. Therefore, we compared the peer review process employed by legal journals in three countries, Croatia, Italy and Spain, to find out their characteristics. In this study, 34 Croatian, 36 Spanish and 40 Italian law journals (selected randomly from the 153 top ranking Italian law journals) were analysed. For each journal, we collected basic set of metadata, as well as a document providing the description of the peer-review process. We collected 107 documents in four languages (English, Croatian, Italian and Spanish) which were analysed in order to find out characteristics of the peer review process. For text analysis, we developed an extensive categorization dictionary. Nine main categories in the Categorization dictionary are peer review (process and reviewers), reviewer's characteristics (academic level, autonomy, competence), reviewer's provenance (external, internal), peer review blindness/openness (single-blind, double-blind, open), number of reviewers (one, two), evaluation criteria for submissions (originality, methods, relevance, clarity, accuracy, etc.), peer review outcome (report, acceptance, rejection), ethical issues (editorial standards and codes, conflict of interests, confidentiality, research integrity), manuscript type (original scientific article, professional article, etc.). The most frequent categories are "peer review", "submissions' evaluation criteria" and "manuscript type", present in more than 90% of the collected documents. "Reviewer's competences" are the most represented subcategory in "“reviewer's characteristics“, as high level of reviewers expertise in the legal sciences is important for law journals. 73% of analyzed journals are declaring anonymous peer review, 25% double-blind peer review, and only one journal employ single-blind peer review. 42% of documents contained information on "two reviewers", 8% "one reviewer" and 7% "three or more reviewers". Ethical issues are certainly under-represented in documents describing peer review process and editorial policies issued by Italian, Spanish and Croatian law journals. Only 32% of the documents mention conflict of interests, and all other subcategories are present even less than 30%. Croatian legal journals are addressing research misconduct and different publication types more than the other two countries. Also, they consider manuscript originality as very important, but some important submission evaluation criteria, reviewer characteristics and peer review outcomes are not present. On the other hand, Spanish legal journals are addressing more reviewer's competences, but some important ethical issues are missing. Italian legal journals take care about the reviewer's competences, academic level and objectivity, as well as anonymity of the peer review process, but expected peer review outcomes and ethical issues should be mentioned in a greater extent.