naa a22 4500 528787241 20180924065503.0 cr unu---uuuuu 180924e20101014xx s 000 0 eng 10.3929/ethz-b-000023658 doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0013345 doi (ETHRESEARCH)oai:www.research-collection.ethz.ch:20.500.11850/23658 Bornmann Lutz Do Author-Suggested Reviewers Rate Submissions More Favorably than Editor-Suggested Reviewers? A Study on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics [Elektronische Daten] [Lutz Bornmann, Hans-Dieter Daniel] PLoS ONE Open access ethresearch Background Ratings in journal peer review can be affected by sources of bias. The bias variable investigated here was the information on whether authors had suggested a possible reviewer for their manuscript, and whether the editor had taken up that suggestion or had chosen a reviewer that had not been suggested by the authors. Studies have shown that author-suggested reviewers rate manuscripts more favorably than editor-suggested reviewers do. Methodology/Principal Findings Reviewers' ratings on three evaluation criteria and the reviewers' final publication recommendations were available for 552 manuscripts (in total 1145 reviews) that were submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an interactive open access journal using public peer review (authors' and reviewers' comments are publicly exchanged). Public peer review is supposed to bring a new openness to the reviewing process that will enhance its objectivity. In the statistical analysis the quality of a manuscript was controlled for to prevent favorable reviewers' ratings from being attributable to quality instead of to the bias variable. Conclusions/Significance Our results agree with those from other studies that editor-suggested reviewers rated manuscripts between 30% and 42% less favorably than author-suggested reviewers. Against this backdrop journal editors should consider either doing without the use of author-suggested reviewers or, if they are used, bringing in more than one editor-suggested reviewer for the review process (so that the review by author-suggested reviewers can be put in perspective). Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 ethresearch Daniel Hans-Dieter joint author PLoS ONE PubMed Central 5 (10), p. e13345 1932-6203 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/23658 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) 1 Journal Article ethresearch ETHRESEARCH 856 40 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/23658 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) ETHRESEARCH 100 1- Bornmann Lutz ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Daniel Hans-Dieter joint author ETHRESEARCH 773 0- PLoS ONE PubMed Central 5 (10), p. e13345 1932-6203 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH Journal Article Open access