مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Increasing challenges are faced to ensure the quality of the academic publication system. The exponential growth of the scholarly output and the shortcomings of the current review publication paradigms (Florian, 2012; Kriegeskorte & Deca, 2012; Priem & Hemminger, 2012) stress the need for a growing pool of reviewers. Consequently, there is a greater need to identify proper incentives to stimulate reviewers’ contribution. Refused review requests, delayed review reports, and hardships in finding new reviewers are frequent problems faced by the grant funding organizations (Schroter, Groves, & Højgaard, 2010). A great challenge is to find committed, high-quality, experienced reviewers, available to invest their time in the review process. Considering all these challenges, one can note an ever-increasing gap between the number of reviewers needed and the number of reviewers available (Ketchen, 2008; Schroter et al. 2010). To benefit from a review system that increases its quality standards, stronger attempts to support the review process are mandatory. Thus, identifying incentive strategies (Azar, 2006; Northcraft & Tenbrunsel, 2011), which motivate academics to peer review impacts heavily on the quality management of research output. Starting from here, this paper explores referees’ motivational frame when reviewing, aiming to identify strategies able to boost the peer review behaviour.

Implemented since the early 18th century (Rennie, 2003), the peer review process developed more systematically as a result of the quantitative growth of research output, and increased specialization (Ware, 2008). The term peer review has already come into regular use, but it continues to mean different things to different journal editors. Similarly, peer review practices vary across fields and publications. Despite the many types of peer review, the main objective is to support editors in selecting and improving manuscripts for publication.

Notwithstanding the benefits entailed by the development of the peer review systems, numerous limitations still exist. Some of the criticisms are: the lack of science-based results to prove the efficiency of the peer review system (Jefferson, Rudin, Brodney Folse, & Davidoff, 2007); low reliability between reviewers (Rothwell & Martyn, 2000); delay time from submission to acceptance; openness to biases associated with language, and academic field; the tendency to favour positive results (Rennie, 2003) or failure in detecting errors (Godlee, Gale, & Martyn, 1998).