Online Peer Review Research Articles

Focus on Peer Review: An Online Peer Review Course by Nature Masterclasses

Focus on Peer Review: An Online Peer Review Course by Nature Masterclasses

Evaluating the effectiveness of a preclinical practice of tooth preparation using digital training system: A randomised controlled trial

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of preclinical training on ceramic crown preparation using digital training system compared with traditional training method. A sample of 66 participating fourth-year undergraduate dental students were randomly assigned to one of two groups for ceramic crown preparation: experimental group as trained using digital method with Online Peer-Review System (OPRS) and Real-time Dental Training and Evaluation System (RDTES); control group as trained using traditional method with instructor demonstration and evaluation. At the completion of training periods, both groups performed the preparation of ceramic crown of upper left central incisor, which were blindly scored by the experienced instructors under the pre-defined assessment criteria. The results of both were compared using Student's t-test or Wilcoxon signed rank test. The level of significance was P<.05. The questionnaires regarding the benefits or drawbacks of digital training system were answered by the students of experimental group. Five of 15 items in the assessment outcome of the digital group were significantly better than the traditional group. The questionnaire results from the students of the experimental group indicated 96.97% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that using digital training system could better improve the practical ability than traditional method. The total scores of practical results were significantly positively correlated with the points of the questionnaires. The digital training system with OPRS and RDTES might be a good alternative to the traditional training method in the preclinical course of dental practice.

The Differential Effects of Online Peer Review and Expert Review on Service Evaluations

The present research investigates the differential effects of online peer review and expert review on consumers’ evaluations of experience and credence services. We propose that these effects are mediated by consumers’ confidence in their service evaluation and moderated by information convergence. We conduct three studies to test our hypotheses. Study 1 shows that consumers evaluate experience (vs. credence) services more favorably when exposed to peer review (vs. expert review). Across the three studies, we show that the interaction effects between information source and service type on service evaluation are mediated by consumer confidence. Importantly, we identify the moderating role of information convergence on these effects (Studies 2 and 3). Convergent positive reviews substantiate the interaction effects between information source and service type on service evaluation. Interestingly, when consumers see mixed information from either similar or different sources, negative expert review has greater influence than negative peer review in lowering consumer confidence and their evaluations of both experience and credence services. These findings contribute to the literature on information processing in the services domain and also have significant practical implications on managing consumer expectations of third-party information.

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Engaging Saudi EFL Students in Online Peer Review in a Saudi University Context

This study focuses on a Saudi English as a foreign language (EFL) context. It employs Google Docs as an educational tool to engage Saudi EFL students in online peer review to address some challenges faced instructors when they implement peer review in class. The main goals of the study are examining what kinds of corrective feedback that Saudi EFL students provide when they edit their peers’ texts in Google Docs, how they can improve their texts based on the collaborative online peer review, and what their attitudes are toward using Google Docs as an online peer review tool. The study utilizes Google Docs, an online questionnaire, and an interview as research tools; after thematic analysis, the results show that Saudi EFL students focus on local and global writing issues and provide different types of corrective feedback that aid them to improve their writing. They have positive attitudes toward using Google Docs in peer review. This tool allows them to engage in an online social environment outside the classroom, feel as critical editors, adjust their writing, and avoid embarrassment. The results also suggest that hierarchical power in the classroom and students’ prior beliefs and experiences can impact their responses to the given feedback from teachers and peers. This study recommends instructors to integrate online peer review as a genre and move beyond low-stakes genre in EFL writing courses at the university level.

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

A research on innovative management of teaching assessment- using I.T. to implement students' on-line peer review of learning outcomes through rubric

The assessment of a student’s learning outcome in a particular course is aimed not only to evaluate the learning effects but also to actively provide the student with immediate feedback to improve performance. However, the conventional methods for assessment are mostly concerned with the learning effects. In this study, the free software of General Public License is adopted to develop a database platform to let students of different learning teams conduct a peer review online, both quantitatively and qualitatively. With the system, inter and intra team peer reviews are also implemented. The findings help facilitate the conduct of online rubric quantitative and qualitative reviews, regardless of self or mutual ones. A multidimensional evaluation of learning outcome is therefore achieved. More crucially, the finding offer students an opportunity to drill down their learning effects, to understand current learning status, and to be acquainted with the feedback or comments made by peers. It also helps the learners modify their pace as well as strategies to eventually better their learning outcome.

Increasing Quality and Involvement in Online Peer Feedback Exchange

Design instructors are integrating the use of online peer review platforms to keep pace with growing class sizes. However, these platforms typically prioritize randomized peer assignment strategies and show only the current solution to peers when writing feedback. This can result in low quality feedback in project-based design courses. We report on an experiment in which students (N=59) worked on twelve-week design projects and both wrote and received online feedback at four stages. The experiment tested a novel assignment strategy of peer mentorship, where peers were assigned to give feedback to all stages of the same project, and tested showing the context from the preceding design stage when composing feedback. The results showed that displaying the context from the preceding design stage led to feedback with higher perceived quality at the late design stages (but not at earlier stages) and feedback from mentors prompts longer responses from the feedback recipients. Our work contributes deeper empirical understanding of how assignment strategies and showing additional context affects peer feedback and provides practical guidelines for instructors to implement these methods in design courses.

Online Peer Review Using Turnitin in First-Year Writing Classes

With the development of PeerMark functions, Turnitin begins to capture researchers’ and instructors’ attention as a novel peer review tool. This article reports an empirical study that examines students’ peer feedback using Turnitin and their perceptions in two First-Year Writing classes, one for mainstream students and the other for ESL students. The participants conducted peer review activities using multiple Turnitin features (e.g., Commenting tools, Composition marks, and PeerMark questions) for two writing assignments–summary & response paper and argumentative paper. Analyses of archived Turnitin peer review records revealed that students provided a majority of revision-oriented feedback, in both global areas (e.g., content, organization, and citation) and local areas (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, and format), although variations were identified across both classes and both tasks. Questionnaire survey and interviews indicated that students unanimously reported positive perceptions of Turnitin-based peer feedback. They appreciated distinctive features of Turnitin that facilitated their peer review activities; they also shared the perceived constraints and constructive suggestions. This study further informs affordances of new technologies for online peer review.

Peer review in scientific journal

Peer review is the critical assessment of manuscripts submitted to scientific journals to facilitate ‘a fair hearing’ by experts in the field, to help authors and editors to improve the quality of reporting. It plays important role to ensure the integrity of research and publication, help maintain trust and ethical conduct of researcher and journal. By and large it is a quality control measure.&#x0D; Peer review starts with internal review for the suitability of manuscript to the journal, whether author have followed the guidelines. Normally two experts are sent the manuscript for review to see for the originality of work, study design, methodology, and relevance of the research. When both reviewers advise to accept, or reject the work, the decision is easier for the editor. When there are controversies, the editor may send for 3rd review. The final decision is solely that of the editor.&#x0D; Peer review is the basis of good science. Reviewing is a skill that requires to be developed. The reviewers are contacted by journal office, requesting their availability to complete the review within a certain time frame, usually 1-2 weeks. First abstract is sent to and if the reviewer agrees, the full manuscript is made available, either by email or by providing link to the online peer review system. The reviewers are required to declare any conflicts of interest to maintain ethics, keep the information confidential and do not publicly disclose or uses the information for personal gain. All comments regarding the review are communicated to the journal and not to the authors directly. The reviewers are requested for ‘constructive, concise and polite’ comments.

Charting the routes to revision: An interplay of writing goals, peer comments, and self-reflections from peer reviews

Building upon self-regulated learning theories, we examined the nature of student writing goals and the relationship of these writing goals to revision alone and in combination with two other important sources of students’ self-regulated revision—peer comments on their writing, and reflections for their own writing obtained from reviewing others’ writing. Data were obtained from a large introductory undergraduate class in the context of two 1000-word writing assignments involving online peer review and a required revision. We began with an investigation of students’ free response learning goals and a follow-up quantitative survey about the nature and structure of these writing goals. We found that: (a) students tended to create high-level substantive goals more often, (b) students change their writing goals across papers even for a very similar assignment, and (c) their writing goals divide into three dimensions: general writing goals, genre writing goals, and assignment goals. We then closely coded and analyzed the relative levels of association of revision changes with writing goals, peer comments, reflections from peer review, and combinations of these sources. Findings suggest that high-level revisions are commonly associated with writing goals, are especially likely to occur for combinations of the three sources, and peer comments alone appeared to make the largest contributions to revision.

A prospective study on an innovative online forum for peer reviewing of surgical science.

BackgroundPeer review is important to the scientific process. However, the present system has been criticised and accused of bias, lack of transparency, failure to detect significant breakthrough and error. At the British Journal of Surgery (BJS), after surveying authors’ and reviewers’ opinions on peer review, we piloted an open online forum with the aim of improving the peer review process.MethodsIn December 2014, a web-based survey assessing attitudes towards open online review was sent to reviewers with a BJS account in Scholar One. From April to June 2015, authors were invited to allow their manuscripts to undergo online peer review in addition to the standard peer review process. The quality of each review was evaluated by editors and editorial assistants using a validated instrument based on a Likert scale.ResultsThe survey was sent to 6635 reviewers. In all, 1454 (21.9%) responded. Support for online peer review was strong, with only 10% stating that they would not subject their manuscripts to online peer review. The most prevalent concern was about intellectual property, being highlighted in 118 of 284 comments (41.5%). Out of 265 eligible manuscripts, 110 were included in the online peer review trial. Around 7000 potential reviewers were invited to review each manuscript. In all, 44 of 110 manuscripts (40%) received 100 reviews from 59 reviewers, alongside 115 conventional reviews. The quality of the open forum reviews was lower than for conventional reviews (2.13 (± 0.75) versus 2.84 (± 0.71), P<0.001).ConclusionOpen online peer review is feasible in this setting, but it attracts few reviews, of lower quality than conventional peer reviews.

HortIM™: An Online Peer Review System for Horticultural Teaching and Extension Instructional Materials

Based on a survey of the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS), membership need was identified for an online peer review system to validate innovation and recognize excellence in science-based teaching and extension scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes. This system would also provide a clearinghouse for instructional materials of merit for use in classrooms, laboratories, and outreach education, which fall outside the parameters of the three academic journals of ASHS. It was determined HortTechnology already provided a valued outlet for peer review of manuscript style teaching and extension scholarship; however, a need was identified for a mechanism to provide peer review of instructional materials which did not conform to a traditional manuscript format. Herein we describe the process that led to the development and launch of HortIM™, a new peer review system for teaching and extension instructional materials. An online peer review process for juried assessment of instructional materials such as articles, bulletins, case studies, fact sheets, instructional videos, teaching modules, and laboratory exercises was developed. A beta test of initial solicited materials in each category was piloted resulting in an initial database of these scholarly materials. This activity culminated in an initial opening of the system for submissions in Fall 2016. This article documents the development of HortIM™, including the submission and review process.

Contribution of Online Peer Review to Effectiveness of EFL Writing

Since the 1990’s, the online peer review has held the growing amount of attentions and has turned into a research focus for global educational experts and language professionals. However, there are very limited studies worked on the part of online peer review. In this paper, we stressed on the effectiveness of online peer review on improving EFL writing among Chinese undergraduates. Two groups are picked as the experimental group and the control group respectively, the conclusion was made on the basis of carefully collected data and qualitative- quantitative methods. The results proved that the online peer review contributed to the effectiveness for college students’ writing performance. Admittedly, our research has deficiencies in both width and depth of processing and analysis. More efforts are expected to carried on the afterward exploration.

Can two-sided messages increase the helpfulness of online reviews?

Purpose – Online reviews are increasingly available for a wide range of products and services. Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of the presence of customer reviews to an online retailer, but the issue of what makes online reviews helpful to a consumer in the process of making a purchase decision remains uninvestigated. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – Given the strategic potential of online reviews, this study drew on past research to develop a conceptual understanding of the components of helpfulness and to further empirically test the model using actual online review data from iPeen.com in Taiwan. A content analysis of 989 reviews across four products identified the interplay effects of review sidedness, reviewer’s expertise, and product type on the helpfulness of an online review. Findings – For search goods, consumers consider two-sided reviews to be more helpful than one-sided reviews when the reviewers are experts in writing such articles, whereas they consider two-sided reviews to be equally helpful as one-sided reviews when the reviewers are novices. Conversely, for experience goods, consumers consider one-sided reviews to be more helpful than two-sided reviews when the reviewers are experts in writing review articles, but they consider one-sided reviews to be equally helpful as two-sided reviews when the reviewers are novices. Practical implications – With an understanding of how review sidedness affects online review helpfulness, online retailers could establish the policy for promoting the helpfulness of reviews more effectively. Originality/value – This research yields at least three important contributions: first, it contributes to the message sidedness literature by showing which arguments (one- or two-sided) are deemed to be helpful; second, it contributes to the online peer review literature by demonstrating the importance of considering product type and heuristic cues (i.e. the reviewer’s expertise) when explaining helpfulness; and third, the results in this research demonstrate that people are drawn to dual-processing; that is, the judgment of online review helpfulness is determined by heuristic cues (e.g. the status of the reviewer) and systematic processing (e.g. review content).

Dyads Versus Groups: Using Different Social Structures in Peer Review to Enhance Online Collaborative Learning Processes

&lt;p&gt;The Peer Review (PR) is a very popular technique to support socio-constructivist and connectivist learning processes, online or face-to-face, at all educational levels, in both formal and informal contexts. The idea behind this technique is that sharing views and opinions with others by discussing with peers and receiving and providing formative feedback enriches the quality of learning. In this study, a class of trainee teachers conducts an online PR. The resulting interactions are analyzed and evaluated by the researchers through the application of an evaluation model based on both quantitative and qualitative data. In particular, two conditions are studied, namely the PR in groups versus the PR in dyads. Results show that students who carried out the PR in groups were less active from the cognitive point of view, while they devoted more effort to deal with organizational matters and discourse facilitation.&lt;/p&gt;

Process modeling and bottleneck mining in online peer-review systems.

This paper is divided into three main parts. In the first part of the study, we captured, collected and formatted an event log describing the handling of reviews for proceedings of an international conference in Thailand. In the second part, we used several process mining techniques in order to discover process models, social, organizational, and hierarchical structures from the proceeding’s event log. In the third part, we detected the deviations and bottlenecks of the peer review process by comparing the observed events (i.e., authentic dataset) with a pre-defined model (i.e., master map). Finally, we investigated the performance information as well as the total waiting time in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the online submission and peer review system for the prospective conferences and seminars. Consequently, the main goals of the study were as follows: (1) to convert the collected event log into the appropriate format supported by process mining analysis tools, (2) to discover process models and to construct social networks based on the collected event log, and (3) to find deviations, discrepancies and bottlenecks between the collected event log and the master pre-defined model. The results showed that although each paper was initially sent to three different reviewers; it was not always possible to make a decision after the first round of reviewing; therefore, additional reviewers were invited. In total, all the accepted and rejected manuscripts were reviewed by an average of 3.9 and 3.2 expert reviewers, respectively. Moreover, obvious violations of the rules and regulations relating to careless or inappropriate peer review of a manuscript—committed by the editorial board and other staff—were identified. Nine blocks of activity in the authentic dataset were not completely compatible with the activities defined in the master model. Also, five of the activity traces were not correctly enabled, and seven activities were missed within the online submission system. On the other hand, dealing with the feedback (comments) received from the first and the third reviewers; the conference committee members and the organizers did not attend to those feedback/comments in a timely manner.

Enhancing Student Experience and Performance through Peer-Assisted Learning

ABSTRACTThis study examines the effectiveness of an online peer review forum (forum). The study allows comparisons to be made between different forum scenarios. The forum was introduced, over a series of semesters, in a first-year accounting screencast assignment: from no forum, to an optional forum, to a compulsory forum. Students indicated that the compulsory forum, underpinned by more structured guidelines for providing feedback, was more beneficial in facilitating improvement in their assignment quality and learning outcomes. We observed improved student performance where a forum was made available. This result is stronger where the use of the forum was optional relative to where it was compulsory. We surmise that this was caused by a higher proportion of exemplar screencasts being posted by more motivated and confident students in the optional forum, creating higher perceived expectations across the total student population. Our findings suggest that more structured feedback through the forum does not necessarily lead to higher performance, even though students value more structured constructive and critical comments as part of their learning experience. These findings highlight the importance of carefully considering forum design and assessment guidelines when embarking on peer review learning initiatives.

Web 2.0 and academic debate: Social media challenges traditions in scientific publishing.

Web 2.0 and academic debate: Social media challenges traditions in scientific publishing.

Welcome to eNeurologicalSci (eNS)!

Welcome to eNeurologicalSci (eNS)!