Practical Suggestions for Improving Scholarly Peer Review Quality and Reducing Cycle Times

Abstract

Scholarly peer review is both central to scientific progress and deeply flawed. Peer review is prejudiced, capricious, inefficient, ineffective, and generally unscientific. Management journals have longer review cycles than journals in other fields. Long cycle times demonstrably harm early-career researchers. Meanwhile, a lack of transparency conceals and facilitates editorial misconduct, and legitimate criticism of peer review is often dismissed as unfounded resentment. We can address Tthese problems can be addressed by eliminating unnecessary reviewing, simplifying the peer review process, introducing author rebuttals, creating an AIS ombudsman, and enforcing the relationship between submitting and reviewing. These problems areThe problems with peer review, however, are entangled with fundamental problems with journals. Ultimately, therefore, peer review can only be fixed in conjunction with replacing journals with repositories.