The Review Process at PSPB: Correlates of Interreviewer Agreement and Manuscript Acceptance

Abstract

Reviewer agreement and the predictors of publication judgments were investigated for first-submission manuscripts to the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin during a 3 1/2—year period (i.e., one editor’s tenure). Among the findings were the following: Reviewers’ judgments of manuscripts were multirather than unidimensional; reviewer agreement about methodology and overall recommendation was greater among high-prestige than mixed-prestige reviewers; authors with high prestige and authors with low professional experience submitted longer manuscripts than their counterparts; author prestige and text length were positively related to publication judgments of reviewers and editors; and author gender was related to editor’s decisions with female authors receiving less favorable decisions than males. The possible mediation of these findings and their implications for understanding the peer-review process in personality and social psychology are discussed.