title: Editorial behaviors in peer review.
abstract: Editors play a critical role in the peer review system. How do editorial behaviors affect the performance of peer review? No quantitative model to date allows us to measure the influence of editorial behaviors on different peer review stages such as, manuscript distribution and final decision making. Here, we propose an agent-based model in which the process of peer review is guided mainly by the social interactions among three kinds of agents representing authors, editors and reviewers respectively. We apply this model to analyze a number of editorial behaviors such as decision strategy, number of reviewers and editorial bias on peer review. We find out that peer review outcomes are significantly sensitive to different editorial behaviors. With a small fraction (10 %) of biased editors, the quality of accepted papers declines 11 %, which indicates that effects of editorial biased behavior is worse than that of biased reviewers (7 %). While several peer review models exist, this is the first account for the study of editorial behaviors that is validated on the basis of simulation analysis.
authors.affiliation: School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621 China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621 China.
authors.forename: Xiangjie
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.affiliation: School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621 China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621 China.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621 China.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: WISE Lab, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116085 China.
authors.forename: Xianwen
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
keywords: Agent-based model; Editor; Referee