The association of gender, experience, and academic rank in peer-reviewed manuscript evaluation.

: We consider a research model for manuscript evaluation using a two-stage process. In the first stage, the current submission reminds reviewers of previous reviewing experiences, and then, reviewers aggregate these past review experiences into a kind of norm for assessing the scientific contribution and clarity of writing required for a manuscript. In the second stage, the reviewer's norms are imposed on the manuscript under review, and the reviewer's attention is drawn to discrepancies between the norm retrieved from previous similar peer review experiences and the reality for this submission.

What is the sensitivity and specificity of the peer review process?

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of sensitivity and specificity to mathematically describe the accuracy of the peer review process. Sensitivity refers to the probability that the final decision for a manuscript would be acceptance, provided the manuscript meets the journal standards required for publication (i.e.

The Game Between a Biased Reviewer and His Editor.

This paper shows that, for a large range of parameters, the journal editor prefers to delegate the choice to review the manuscript to the biased referee. If the peer review process is informative and the review reports are costly for the reviewers, even biased referees with extreme scientific preferences may choose to become informed about the manuscript's quality. On the contrary, if the review process is potentially informative but the reviewer reports are not costly for the referees, the biased reviewer has no incentive to become informed about the manuscript.