Report on Grouped Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in the Social Sciences and Related Fields

Independent, multiple peer review in science and scholarship is the equivalent of
democracy in politics – sometimes awkward, often criticised, but ‘the least bad way to do things’, all things considered (for a full discussion, see Chapter 3 of ASSAf’s
Consensus Report on Scholarly Books: their Production, Use and Evaluation in South
Africa Today: ASSAf, 2009, Pretoria). The traditional focus of peer review is on a single journal article, book chapter or book.
Journals have not often been subjected to independent, multiple peer review, and
are usually evaluated in qualitative, reputational terms, or, more recently, quasi-quantitatively by the bibliometrics of impact factors.
Peer review of journal titles thus requires the development of an unfamiliar methodology, including encouraging peers to undertake a task that seems daunting when approached in the traditional way of close reading and evaluation of an entire work.
We have accordingly taken on this ambitious programme of peer reviewing, in groups, all scholarly journals published in South Africa, by ‘paving the way’ in two pilot reviews; these have respectively examined the last 3-5 years of local journals in the Social Sciences and related fields and those in the Agricultural and related Basic Life Sciences. Multi-perspective peer review panels were appointed by the Academy
Council on the recommendation of the Academy’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa; editors were requested to complete specially designed questionnaires, and peer reviewers were selected from a spectrum of scholars in the fields concerned.
Each was asked to provide answers to a set of pointed questions, which addressed
the quality, scope and focus of the peer-reviewed articles in the journals under review, the authorship generally, and the presence or absence of enrichment features such as editorials, topical reviews, book reviews and ‘news and views’ articles. [The editors’ questionnaire and peer reviewers question list are provided as Appendices to this Report.]