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 some dismiss legitimate criticism of peer review as unfounded resentment. We can address these problems 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 are, however, entangled with fundamental problems with journals. Ultimately, therefore, we can only fix peer review in conjunction with replacing journals with repositories.