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Mentorship practices that improve the culture of peer review

The current system of peer review drives racial and gender disparities in publication and funding outcomes and can suppress the perspectives of marginalized scholars. Established researchers have an opportunity to help to build a fairer and more inclusive peer review culture by advocating for and empowering their trainees.

Imagine researching a fundamental problem in psychology that has real-world implications. Now imagine having that work rejected because “the focus on race is ideologically motivated and cannot be trusted” or “this paper is better suited for a specialty journal.” These are paraphrased excerpts from peer reviews on manuscripts reporting findings on racial bias, taken from our own experiences and an unpublished preprint1. In principle, peer review should promote rigour and improve research, fairly considering all research topics and study populations. However, in practice the current peer review culture leads to disproportionately negative outcomes for marginalized scholars. This systemic bias in peer review is perpetuated through individual-level biases (including preferences for work by authors who share the reviewer’s and/or editor’s gender and/or racial identities) as well as structural-level biases (including devaluation of topics or methods pursued by marginalized scholars)1,2. These biases lead the current peer review culture to prioritize research advanced by a narrow and privileged slice of society — the largely white, male-dominated culture that shaped current scientific perspectives — and ultimately limits psychological knowledge.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (DGE-2224777).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Mariam Aly

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Shahana Ansari & Amanda B. Diekman

  3. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Eliana Colunga

  4. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    M. J. Crockett

  5. University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    M. J. Crockett

  6. Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Matthew Goldrick

  7. Department of Psychology, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA

    Pablo Gomez

  8. Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Franki Y. H. Kung

  9. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Paul C. McKee

  10. Department of Psychology, North Park University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Miriam Pérez

  11. Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Sarah M. Stilwell

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  1. Mariam Aly
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Mariam Aly.

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Aly, M., Ansari, S., Colunga, E. et al. Mentorship practices that improve the culture of peer review.
Nat Rev Psychol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00261-1

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  • Published: 17 November 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00261-1

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