State of peer review 2024
Methods and respondents
In March 2024, we asked 94,884 researchers to complete our state of peer review survey, and received responses from 3046 individuals.
We contacted users regardless of whether they had previously peer reviewed for IOP Publishing, with the expectation that most researchers would have peer reviewed for another publisher, and that the opinions of early-career researchers who had not yet started on their peer reviewing career would also be of value.
To encourage recipients to complete the survey, we offered a cash prize to a respondent picked at random, and pledged to plant a tree via a registered charity for the first 500 respondents. To deter people from submitting multiple or falsified entries, full terms and conditions stated that we would only consider one response per email address, and the email addresses must have been registered within our system as of 11 March 2024.
The survey was open for two weeks and two email reminders were sent to encourage users to complete the survey.
We received responses from individuals in 105 countries.
3019 (99%) opted to respond to the gender question, with 79% of respondents identifying as male, 19% as female, <1% (9 out of 3019) as non-binary and 1.4% (43 out of 3019) prefer not to say.
Respondents worked in a wide range of fields in the physical and environmental sciences, representative of the range of subjects on which IOP Publishing publishes research.