Reviewing Peer Review: A Quantitative Analysis of Peer Review

In this paper we focus on the analysis of peer reviews and reviewers behavior in a number of different review processes. More specifically, we report on the development, definition and rationale of a theoretical model for peer review processes to support the identification of appropriate metrics to assess the processes main properties. We then apply the proposed model and analysis framework to data sets from conference evaluation processes and we discuss the results implications and their eventual use toward improving the analyzed peer review processes. A number of unexpected results were found, in particular: (1) the low correlation between peer review outcome and impact in time of the accepted contributions and (2) the presence of an high level of randomness in the analyzed peer review processes.