The Performance of Peer Review and a Beauty Contest of Referee Processes of Economics Journals/

Peer review influences decisively personal advancement, research opportunities, salaries, grant-funding, promotion, and tenure. It claims to exert quality control of manuscripts and improve them, to promote innovative research, foster dissemination of new research, and to serve as a means to rank researchers, journals, and institutions. Nowadays per review mainly serves the purpose of imprinting a signal of quality on a scholar’s research. This requires a perfect performance of peer review. However, empirical research has shown that peer review lacks validity, impartiality, and fairness, which makes its claim to imprint manuscript excellence dubious. This is demonstrated in the first part of this paper which surveys peer-review research across all disciplines. In the second part of this paper, we report on an internet investigation conducted among economics authors. We found that there is a group of some eight top economics journals which fall at the bottom in most rankings. Moreover, we found that authors appreciate competence and carefulness of referee reports even more than manuscript acceptance.