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Understanding authors' psychological reactions to peer reviews: a text mining approach

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Abstract

Peer reviews play a vital role in academic publishing. Authors have various feelings towards peer reviews. This study analyzes the experiences shared by authors in Scirev.org to understand these authors' psychological reactions to several aspects of peer reviews, including decisions, turnaround time, the number of reviews, and review quality. Text mining was used to extract different types of psychological reactions of authors, including affective processes and cognitive processes. Results show that authors' psychological responses to peer reviews are complex and cannot be summarized by a single numerical rating directly given by the authors. Rejection invokes anger, sadness, and disagreement, but not anxiety. Fast turnaround arouses positive emotions from authors, but slow peer review processes do not increase negative emotions as much. Low-quality reviews lead to a wide array of negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, and sadness.

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The original data is available in csv format.

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The source code used for analysis can be made available upon request.

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Funding

Joseph Healey Research Grant was used to support this research.

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The first author of this study executed the entire research.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shan Jiang.

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This study has no conflicts of interest with other parties.

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Not applicable.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5, 6 and 7.

Table 5 Regression analysis with basic linguistic variables as dependent variables, with 95% Confidence Intervals
Table 6 Regression analysis with proportion of affective process words as dependent variables, with 95% Confidence Intervals
Table 7 Regression analysis with proportion of cognitive process words as dependent variables, with 95% Confidence Intervals

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Jiang, S. Understanding authors' psychological reactions to peer reviews: a text mining approach. Scientometrics 126, 6085–6103 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04032-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04032-8

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