Types of peer review

Types of Peer Review

In today’s blog, we will review the different peer review types used by the research journals. 

As you already know, the peer review system allows that a certain paper is reviewed by one or more people with similar knowledge and competence as the author of the work. This system is used in order to maintain a certain level of quality in the papers to be published in the research journals.

As you will appreciate, there are many ways to classify the peer review types. However, in this post we will review them by the most common classification, which is their transparency level:

1.- Closed peer review

Single Blind peer review

This type of review is the most common one for science    journals. A single blind peer review means that the author does not know who the reviewers are. Most of the Health sciences and Physical science journals (95%) use this type of review.

Double Blind peer review

If a journal requires a Double Blind peer review, then the author will not know the identity of the reviewers and viceversa. This type is the most common one in Social science and Humanities. At least, an 84% of the journals use this type of peer review.

Triple Blind peer review

Another peer review system, is the triple blind. By this system, just like the Double Blind peer review, the author and the reviewer do not know their respective identity. However, by this system, the identity of the editor is not known either. This type of review system is used by some Social and Humanities journals

2.- Open peer review

Finally, there is another type of peer review that is being used by more and more journals. It is the Open peer review which means that the identity of the authors and the reviewers are known by all participants. 

Final thoughts

As we have explained, the peer review system has become an essential tool to analize the quality of a research before it’s publication. However, there are many different opinions regarding this process.

For example, about the single blind peer review, many people believe that keeping the reviewers names is a mistake. Most of the reviewers can be in the same field of study as the author, and as they do know it’s identity, they can decide to prolong the review process so their article it’s published before. This is a consequence of the high competency in the scholarly

publishing.

The double blind peer review process has it’s own problems too. For instance, the reviewers can recognize the author by the way the article it’s written or by the cites used. There are certain unintentional clues that can lead the refferee to identify the author. Also, the reviewer can do just the same as in single blind peer review and prolong the review process for it’s own benefit.

Finally, the open peer review process is still an experiment, but based on the tendency, more journals will use this system for sure. However, there are some problems when using this review system. As the identity of both the author and the reviewer are public, theres a possibility that authors might retaliate against negative reviewers down the line.

In conclusion, all of the different review types have their own pros and cons, but nowadays the peer review process will continue as an standard for the publication world.

Next week we will review the top 3 cancer reseach journals. Do not forget to stay tuned for our next blog post!