Reviewer performance statistics
The pseudonymous FemaleScienceProfessor is also an editor for a journal. She has reviewed its reviewers:
"I did a quick, statistically invalid analysis of the reviewer data for the past year to see whether the time it took a reviewer to complete the review was random or correlated with seniority. My working hypothesis was that younger scientists do quicker reviews. The dataset is sufficiently large to make an analysis like this reasonable, but I wasn't rigorous about tracking down reviewer time-from-Ph.D. data. I put reviewers in one of several bins: postdoc, assistant professor, mid-career, late-career, retired, and I put research scientists into these same bins based on where they would be in terms of time since Ph.D. if they were tenure-track. It's not a perfect system, but I just wanted to get a sense for any trends. The quickest reviewing groups are the early-career and retired scientists. "
More analysis is provided in FemaleScienceProfessor's post, and there are some reactions in the comments to this post. At the Nature journals we do not publish reviewer statistics of this type, nor do we capture information about the reviwers' gender, seniority level and so on. Is there interest from among our peer-reviewers to know these statistics, and to have published the type of information provided by the preliminary results of FSP?
