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Cell’s mission is to catalyze scientific discovery and enable science and scientists—whoever and wherever they are—to be a powerful force for progress, positive change, and impact, for the benefit of society and health. How we act on this mission is shaped by our core values such as championing change; being approachable and listening; advocating for what we believe in; finding ways to improve; and holding a strong belief in equality, inclusion, and diversity. To achieve our mission, we must uphold our values when we engage with the scientific community, and one of the most important ways that we engage is through facilitating peer review. At Cell, we strive to make peer review a careful and thoughtful process, in which the identity of each potential reviewer is considered, because we appreciate the powerful role reviewers play in shaping the direction of science. We also appreciate that the identity of a scientist is a sum of many parts, including scientific interests, experience, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion, immigration status, career stage, and much more. However, we have not always prioritized taking a holistic view of identity when selecting peer reviewers. This year’s Peer Review Week has the theme of “identity,” prompting us to reflect on our progress in improving representation of diverse reviewer identities and how we might continue to move forward.
Two years ago, we wrote about the lack of diversity in Cell’s reviewer pool and pledged to make things better. Two sobering statistics from 2018 made us realize how skewed our pool was: only 18% of our reviewers were female, and 67% of our male reviewers were from the United States. Compare those metrics to the actual demographics of the research community—a UNESCO report notes that, as of 2015, 28% of the researchers worldwide were women. Within the biomedical sciences, this number goes up to 32% and, with medicine included, 40% (Elsevier Report 2017: Gender in the Global Research Landscape). Knowing these numbers, we made a promise to shift our reviewer pool to more faithfully reflect the diverse pool of individuals doing the science. Why does this matter? Diversity of perspective and opinion are reflective of the scientific community and are central to ensuring thorough, constructive peer review, which helps us shape the content of the journal.
The first metric we decided to focus on was gender, as it seemed more feasible to set targeted goals, establish a system of self-identification and track our progress. In September 2019, the Cell team decided that we would work toward having a target of 33% female reviewers. In practice this meant that editors would aim for each manuscript reviewed at Cell to have at least one female reviewer. It was important for us to track this and be accountable for following through on this metric, and yet we also knew that assigning gender information to reviewers based on our own impressions and perceptions was inaccurate. We thus instituted a question for gender self-identification in our online submission system. This allows anyone who uses our system to choose an option (man, woman, non-binary, or prefer not to say) and for us to track our reviewer, author, or editor gender information in summation to measure progress toward our goal. This feature has now been rolled out across all Cell Press journals and across multiple Elsevier journals as well. We received little, if any, pushback on this question from the community and are extremely thankful to our reviewers for sharing this information. With these efforts, we increased the percentage of female reviewers to 22% in 2019, and by the end of 2020, we were excited to have met our goal of 33% female reviewers, with 0.3% of our reviewer pool identifying as non-binary and 5% preferring not to disclose their gender information.
Between that 2019 editorial and this one, a pandemic happened. With it came challenges and tribulations that disproportionately impacted professional, personal, and societal identities. Authors and reviewers are also parents, caregivers, partners, and breadwinners. Racism, sexism, and bullying are pervasive in science and disproportionately affect certain identities more than others. And COVID-19 has only deepened these disparities and effects, especially on women and underrepresented minorities. On our own end, it had seemed possible that the uncertainties of the pandemic and our efforts in diversifying the reviewer pool might extend the time needed to secure reviewers and peer review a paper, which then could impact our ability to provide authors with a timely review process. We wondered whether we’d see differences in peer-review quality or whether newer reviewers’ lack of familiarity with the journal would impact the reviews. Even before the pandemic, it was extremely important to us that we not overburden our existing female reviewer pool with more requests but instead work toward significantly expanding our pool of qualified reviewers.
In the first 9 months of 2020, the fast-moving nature of COVID-19 research and discovery meant that papers under consideration at Cell needed expedited peer review. We were able to maintain quick turnaround times and still maintain a 30% female reviewer pool during this period thanks to the commitment and engagement of reviewers across the world, including many early-career researchers. For this, we are extremely thankful to our reviewers in this space. We wrote last year that there will always be room for exciting biology at Cell and about our commitment to publishing non-COVID-19 content. To all of our other reviewers who gave us their time and thoughtful feedback amidst the challenges and chaos, we say a heartfelt thank you. While providing a timely review process is a core goal of the journal, we also strongly believe in supporting and empowering those we work with, which can sometimes be achieved by offering flexibility. We will continue to support our reviewers by being flexible on reviewer timelines and requests as best as we can, beyond this pandemic. We’re also happy to report that, since September 2019, these efforts on diversifying the reviewer pool have had little impact on our editorial times, the duration of peer review, or the percentage of papers reviewed and published at Cell, thus establishing that diversifying the reviewer pool does not come at the cost of timeliness or quality of reviews. We recognize the important role our reviewers play and the value of the feedback they give us, and we are working hard as a team to find ways to recognize and acknowledge their contributions.
Having met our initial goal of 33% female reviewers at Cell, we feel confident about starting to address disparities along other demographics. We are currently working on improving geographical balance of our reviewer pool, who as of 2021 come from 43 countries. Yet 66% of these reviewers are in North America and 21% from the UK and Western Europe. Only 4% of our total reviewer pool is from East Asia. As with our efforts on gender, our aim is to set concrete goals toward improving the geographical diversity of our reviewer pool as a next step.
Much of the expansion of our reviewer pool has come about through editorial engagement with the scientific community across different topic areas and online platforms. We have added new reviewers to a Cell Press-wide database by looking at conference speakers, meeting scientists through institute visits, tracking new faculty hiring information on Twitter, and combing through lineage trees and lab alumni websites. However, while many of these tried and tested routes for finding reviewers are helpful, most are prone to geographical, career-stage, and even racial and ethnic biases across identities. For instance, as we perused conference line ups, we couldn’t help but wonder how repetitive or truly representative they were of a topic area. In consideration of this, we also made efforts to add Black and Hispanic/Latinx reviewers by looking at curated lists of scientists at Cell Press and Twitter. We will continue to ask the Cell advisory board to engage with us in this specific context and serve as ambassadors of their fields, geographies, and institutions.
As we continue to look for ways to diversify our reviewer pool, it is important that we mitigate the biases of our historical approaches. It is also important that as editors we acknowledge that we are prone to unconscious biases and have gaps in understanding. In a recent discussion with LGBTQ scientists, we learned about the challenges faced by transgender scientists studying the physiology and impact of hormonal therapy when reviewers themselves have little understanding of the context and societal constraints under which these studies are carried out. Examples such as this help us reflect on how reviewer identity and choice can significantly impact a broader community at large.
Our efforts will rely heavily on engagement with you. To our authors submitting papers, when you suggest reviewers, we ask that you think about the identity of the person who can best judge its impact. What communities have directly influenced, or are impacted by, this work? How would your findings be used, be received, or influence outcomes? Would it be helpful to have a qualified reviewer who can evaluate the paper from this “end user” context? To the reviewers that we invite, if you are unable to take on a review request, please take a moment before you decline to suggest the names of other qualified scientists in your field keeping gender, geography, career stage, and ethnicity in mind. To our readers, we ask you to engage with us, to connect us to your research communities and geographies. Feel free to send us your feedback on Twitter (@CellCellPress) or cellms@cell.com.
As the Cell team seeks to live up to our mission and values, we realize our actions will be far more important than our pledges. We have a lot more ground to cover, goals to define and new directions to pursue. We hope to continue updating you on our efforts in improving peer review.
Web resources
Elsevier Report 2017, Gender in the Global Research Landscape, https://www.elsevier.com/connect/gender-report
UNESCO, “Is the gender gap narrowing in science and engineering?”, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000235447