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Peer Review in Law Journals.
Jadranka Stojanovski1,2, Elías Sanz-Casado3, Tommaso Agnoloni4
1University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia.
Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
|December 27, 2021
Summary
Law journals often lack standardized peer review, with European journals adopting external evaluations. This study analyzed policies from 119 journals, revealing traditional anonymized reviews and common evaluation criteria like originality and relevance.
Area of Science:
- Legal scholarship
- Scholarly publishing
- Academic peer review
Background:
- Legal peer review practices remain distinct and often lack standardized procedures.
- European law journals are increasingly adopting external and independent manuscript evaluation.
- Current peer review processes in legal science publishing require further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate current editorial policies on peer review in Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals.
- To analyze peer review processes, evaluation criteria, and ethical considerations.
- To identify country-specific differences in peer review approaches.
Main Methods:
- Automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available editorial documents from 119 law journals.
- Utilized WordStat8 for analyzing features of peer review, manuscript evaluation, and ethical issues.
- Employed chi-square tests to compare differences in covered topics between countries.
Main Results:
- Most journals (77%) use anonymized peer review with external reviewers (48%).
- Key evaluation criteria include originality (84%), writing quality (70%), and literature references (69%).
- Prominent ethical concerns are reviewer competing interests (31%), plagiarism (26%), and biases (22%).
Conclusions:
- Significant cross-country differences exist in mentioning peer review ethics, reviewer roles, transparency, publication types, and research misconduct.
- Spanish journals emphasize reviewer independence and competence with anonymized processes.
- While peer review is conventional, Croatian, Spanish, and Italian journals show promising trends in transparency, research integrity, and diversity, respectively.
