Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez

• Professor (Associate)
• University of Granada

For scientists, one of the most important points to consider is the right journals for research, current awareness, and publication of results. However, if scientists suffer from imperfect attention, they would pay attention to only a subset of journals in the subject category. Under this scenario, chief editors might affect preferences by using th...

Background: We consider a research model for manuscript evaluation using a two-stage process. In the first stage, the current submission reminds reviewers of previous reviewing experiences, and then, reviewers aggregate these past review experiences into a kind of norm for assessing the scientific contribution and clarity of writing required for a...

Purpose In this paper, we use author clustering based on journal coupling (i.e., shared academic journals) to determine researchers who have the same scientific interests and similar conceptual frameworks. The basic assumption is that authors who publish in the same academic journals are more likely to share similar conceptual frameworks and intere...

In this paper, we study manuscript reviewers in terms of their goal intentions, effort level, and monetary compensation. Building upon our previous paper, “How to motivate a reviewer with a present bias to work harder”, we explore further nuances in reviewer motivations and behaviors. With this aim, we surveyed corresponding authors who have publis...

In this paper, we propose a method to aid authors in choosing alternative keywords that help their papers gain visibility. These alternative keywords must have a certain level of popularity in the scientific community and, simultaneously, be keywords with fewer competitors. The competitors are derived from other papers containing the same keywords....

Authors, editors, and reviewers need to have a good perception regarding the quality of a manuscript in order to improve their skills, save effort, and prevent errors that can affect the submission procedure. In this paper, we compared the author’s perception of a manuscript’s quality with the manuscript’s actual impact. In addition, we analyzed th...

A financial compensation model could incentivise peer reviewers to provide the optimal amount of effort by rewarding them for their quality reports. Therefore, in this article, we consider peer-reviewed journals with the mission to financially compensate reviewers for delivering quality reports and to ensure affordable access to peer review for eve...

In this paper, we present a new method to measure the nodes’ centrality in a multilayer network. The multilayer network represents nodes with different relations between them. The nodes have an initial relevance or importance value. Then, the node’s centrality is obtained according to this relevance along with its relationship to other nodes. Many...

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of sensitivity and specificity to mathematically describe the accuracy of the peer review process. Sensitivity refers to the probability that the final decision for a manuscript would be acceptance, provided the manuscript meets the journal standards required for publication (i.e., true positive rate). Speci...

In this article, we model and study a cooperative peer-review scenario in scholarly publishing. In this scenario, the peer-reviewed journals cooperate in the necessary investment for the peer-review system. However, the final decision on what to publish in each journal would rest with the journal’s editor, and the journals still compete in their qu...

The scientific community has reacted to the COVID-19 outbreak by producing a high number of literary works that are helping us to understand a variety of topics related to the pandemic from different perspectives. Dealing with this large amount of information can be challenging, especially when researchers need to find answers to complex questions...

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of sensitivity and speci-ficity to mathematically describe the accuracy of the peer review process. Sensitivity refers to the probability that the final decision for a manuscript would be acceptance, provided the manuscript meets the journal standards required for publication (i.e., true positive rate). Spec...

In this paper, we propose a method to help authors to choose alternative Keywords that help their papers to gain visibility. These alternative keywords must have a certain level of popularity in the scientific community and, at the same time, be keywords that have fewer competitors. The competitors would be derived from other papers containing the...

Given how hard it is to recruit good reviewers who are aligned with authors in their functions, journal editors could consider the use of better incentives, such as paying reviewers for their time. In order to facilitate a speedy turn-around when a rapid decision is required, the peer-reviewed journal can also offer a review model in which selected...

Reviewers are humans and might be affected by cognitive biases when information overload comes into play. In fact, no amount of scientific training will completely mask the human impulses to partisanship. And the consequence is that authors may receive incorrect editorial decisions in their submissions to peer-reviewed journals. For instance, the j...

One obvious method to prod peer reviewers is to offer them a monetary reward for prompt service. For example, Collabra: Psychology is a mission-driven journal that shares a variable portion of revenue with reviewers and editors. In fact, several studies have found an increase in timely referee reports for journals offering payments. The payment mig...

Given how hard it is to recruit good reviewers who are aligned with authors in their functions, journal editors could consider the use of better incentives, such as paying reviewers for their time. In order to facilitate a speedy turnaround when a rapid decision is required, the peer-reviewed journal can also offer a review model in which selected...

Scientific journals receive an increasing number of submissions and many of them will be desk rejected without receiving detailed feedback from reviewers. In fact, the number of desk rejections has risen dramatically in the last decade. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by examining an editor’s incentives either to issue a desk decisio...

We are glad to invite you to our new website: https://blackcat.ugr.es/quasispecies/ . Quasispecies-Peer Review is a tool that let you to know what is the ability of a researcher to distinguish LOW, MEDIUM and HIGH impact articles in the scientific community. In the pdf you can read the steps to follow.

In this paper, we study the reviewer’s compensation problem in the presence of quality standard considerations. We examine a typical scenario in which a journal has to match the uncertain manuscript quality with a specified quality standard, but it imperfectly observes the reviewer’s efforts. This imperfect observability issue is an edge case where...

Reviewers are humans and might be affected by cognitive biases when information overload comes into play. In fact, no amount of scientific training will completely mask the human impulses to partisanship. And the consequence is that authors may receive incorrect editorial decisions in their submissions to peer-reviewed journals. For instance, the j...

This paper proposes a new method of dimensionality reduction when performing Text Classification, by applying the discrete wavelet transform to the document-term frequencies matrix. We analyse the features provided by the wavelet coefficients from the different orientations: (1) The high energy coefficients in the horizontal orientation correspond...

In a typical scenario in which a peer-reviewed journal has to match the uncertain manuscript’s quality with its quality standard, quality improvement is restricted by the journal’s quality standard. This is so because the reviewer usually seeks to ensure that the manuscript’s quality acceptably matches the journal’s standard. Think, for example, of...

In a typical scenario in which a peer-reviewed journal has to match the uncertain manuscript's quality with its quality standard, quality improvement is restricted by the journal's quality standard. This is so because the reviewer usually seeks to ensure that the manuscript's quality acceptably matches the journal's standard and not a higher qualit...

At the peer review stage, a natural metric to measure the performance of the author is the quality of the revised manuscript, while a natural metric to measure the performance of the reviewer is the mismatch cost between the manuscript quality and the journal standard. This mismatch refers to incorrectly or unsuitably matching the manuscript qualit...

In this paper, we study the reviewer's compensation problem in the presence of quality standard considerations. We consider a typical scenario in which a journal has to match the uncertain manuscript's quality with a quality standard, but it cannot observe the reviewer's efforts. We find that the journal always chooses an incentive scheme to reward...

High-quality journals provide an excellent example of alignment between authors and reviewers strategies. Reviewers in such a setting often help authors to improve their manuscripts before publication, and work to only select the best research. Unfortunately, there are also examples with poor alignment between the author and reviewer strategies lik...

A reduction in reviewer’s recommendation quality may be caused by a limitation of time or cognitive overload that comes from the level of redundancy, contradiction and inconsistency in the research. Some adaptive mechanisms by reviewers who deal with situations of information overload may be chunking single pieces of manuscript information into gen...

A reduction in reviewer's recommendation quality may be caused by a limitation of time or cognitive overload that comes from the level of redundancy, contradiction and inconsistency in the research. Some adaptive mechanisms by reviewers who deal with situations of information overload may be chunking single pieces of manuscript information into gen...

Authors may believe that having more information available about the research can help reviewers make better recommendations. However, too much information in a manuscript may create problems to the reviewers and may lead them to poorer recommendations. An information overload on the part of the reviewer might be a state in which she faces an amoun...

How much does it cost to publish a research article in a scholarly journal? Different academic publishers have widely varying levels of publication fees to help to fund editorial and peer review administration. In this context, publishers of scientific journals might create author’s ignorance by making the publication fees more complex, thereby gai...

In this paper we consider the problem of a manuscript's author whose objective is to maximize the reviewer's probability of recommending acceptance as a function of the quantity of manuscript attributes. To investigate what is the optimal quantity of research attributes that the author should provide, we must first characterize the optimal evaluati...

The peer review system aims to be effective in separating unacceptable from acceptable manuscripts. However, a reviewer can distinguish them or not. If reviewers distinguish unacceptable from acceptable manuscripts they use a fine partition of categories. But, if reviewers do not distinguish them they use a coarse partition in the evaluation of man...

The peer review system aims to be effective in separating unacceptable from acceptable manuscripts. However, a reviewer can distinguish them or not. If reviewers distinguish unacceptable from acceptable papers they use a fine partition of manuscript categories. But, if reviewers do not distinguish them they use a coarse partition in the evaluation...

This paper shows that, for a large range of parameters, the journal editor prefers to delegate the choice to review the manuscript to the biased referee. If the peer review process is informative and the review reports are costly for the reviewers, even biased referees with extreme scientific preferences may choose to become informed about the manu...

If scholars suffer from imperfect attention, they will not always cite the best paper on a particular topic. The most chosen scholarly works may merely be the most cited ones, not the best articles. Here, a paper is chosen when someone cites it, after paying attention to it. Manuscripts’ authors might affect preferences by using salience to influen...

Several studies have explored how the norm-compliant behavior is learned by observing the actions of others. Regarding the problem of research evaluation in peer review, observing past reviewers behaving pro-socially might produce more pro-social behavior in the potential referees of the future review processes. Our proposal is that every invitatio...

If scholars suffer from imperfect attention, they will not always cite the best paper on a particular topic. The most chosen scholarly works may merely be the most cited ones, not the best articles. Here, a paper is chosen when someone cites it, after paying attention to it. Manuscripts' authors might affect preferences by using salience to influen...

In this paper, the interaction of the reviewers is analyzed in the context of the open peer review. There, the reviewer group can exchange comments on the manuscript. This group of experts is called the informed reviewer group because, with the exchange of comments, each reviewer knows about the trends in the evaluation of the manuscript. Then, we...

In this paper, the interaction of the reviewers is analyzed in the context of the open peer review. There, the reviewer group can exchange comments on the manuscript. This group of experts is called the informed reviewer group because, with the exchange of comments, each reviewer knows about the trends in the evaluation of the manuscript. Then, we...

We illustrate a computational tool that helps to predict the success of a current manuscript in the peer review process of the academic journal. By cluster analysis of the accept/reject predictions for scholarly journals, we have identified seven groups of journals, taking into account the importance and accessibility requirements in the peer revie...

Here, we study readers’ choice in a context in which scholar’s attention is drawn to salient attributes of academic papers such as importance or accessibility. An article’s attribute is salient when it stands out among the paper’s attributes relative to that attribute’s average level in the choice set. In our model, scholars may attach disproportio...

Here we present a computational model that helps to predict the success of a contribution in the peer review process. This predictor faces the choice set identified by the importance and inaccessibility attributes of the manuscript. Following Kahana's model of associative recall, the predictor's memory is a database of past editorial decisions. In...

Why is there bias in peer review? How to deal with bias in peer review? In Chapter 1.1, we present a Bayesian-based formal study on authors' overconfidence, self-serving bias, and lack of learning at the peer review stage. Confirmatory bias induces overconfidence in the sense that people believe more strongly than they should in their favored hypo...

Here, we study readers' choice in a context in which scholar's attention is drawn to salient attributes of academic papers such as importance or accessibility. An article's attribute is salient when it stands out among the paper's attributes relative to that attribute's average level in the choice set. In our model, scholars may attach disproportio...

Why is there bias in peer review? How to deal with bias in peer review? In Part 1, we will provide rational explanations for the occurrence of bias in peer review that affects both manuscript authors, their reviewers and the editors of academic journals themselves. Then, in Part 2, we shall discuss how to deal with bias in peer review.

The scientific quality of the academic journal deeply relies on its peer review policy which may be guided by some cheap talk statement. However, some of these policies may fail to get executed by editors who are responsible for the processing of contributions. In this paper, the peer review strategy is defined as the smallest set of editorial deci...

In this letter, we study an open participation model of peer review in which potential reviewers choose whether to review a manuscript, at a cost, without a formal invitation. The outcome is a compromise among the reviewers’ recommendations. Here we show that the equilibrium number of reviewers in the public peer review is small, their recommendati...

Confirmatory bias induces overconfidence in the sense that people believe more strongly than they should in their preferred hypotheses. This work describes a Bayesian-based formal model to study the effect of overconfidence about the causes of manuscript rejection due to confirmatory bias in peer review. In addition, we also present an online tool...

Here we examine the evolution of manuscript quality control between authors and their editors, using evolutionary games. Within these games, with a certain probability, authors prefer to submit manuscripts of low- or high-quality, and editors prefer to accept low- or high-quality manuscripts. The frequency with which authors (editors) choose to sub...

Authors tend to attribute manuscript acceptance to their own ability to write quality papers and simultaneously to blame rejections on negative bias in peer review, displaying a self-serving attributional bias. Here, a formal model provides rational explanations for this self-serving bias in a Bayesian framework. For the high-ability authors in a v...

This paper provides a formal study on manuscript quality control in peer review. Within this analysis, a biased editor is defined operationally as an editor that exerts a higher (lower) level of quality control. Here we show that if the editor is more biased than the manuscript’s author then the author undertakes the type of revision that the edito...

Here, we develop a theory of the relationship between the reviewer's effort and bias in peer review. From this theory, it follows that journal editors might employ biased reviewers because they shirk less. This creates an incentive for the editor to use monitoring mechanisms (e.g., associate editors supervising the peer review process) that mitigat...

Here we examine the evolution of journal sharing between scientific subject categories, using evolutionary game theory. We assume that there is journal sharing between subject categories if they share common scholarly journals. In this paper, the Prisoners' dilemma (within evolutionary game theory) is used as a metaphor for the problems surrounding...

Adverse selection occurs when a firm signs a contract with a potential worker but his/her key skills are still not known at that time, which leads the employer to make a wrong decision. In this article, we study the example of adverse selection of reviewers when a potential referee whose ability is his private information faces a finite sequence of...

In economics, the principal-agent problem is the difficulty in motivating one party (the agent), to act in the best interests of another (the principal) rather than in his own interests. We consider the example of a journal editor (the principal) wondering whether his or her reviewer (the agent) is recommending rejection of a manuscript because it...

The intent of this article is to use cooperative game theory to predict the level of social impact of scholarly papers created by citation networks. Social impact of papers can be defined as the net effect of citations on a network. A publication exerts direct and indirect influence on others (e.g., by citing articles) and is itself influenced dire...

In addition to the factor of impact and other bibliometric indices, generation of a net profit year on year plays a central role in measuring overall journal publishing performance. However, some business models do not allow the academic journals continue to thrive since they are not financially sustainable. It raises a number of questions which ha...

Here we show how the same organizational structures can arise across seemingly unrelated domains of human activities. To this end we examine the example of academic journals publishing and stock market. A number of academic journals with low-prestige and limited resources may compete in the same selection process of high-quality manuscripts. This s...

This study presents a descriptive analysis of Spanish universities according to their journal publication profile in five scientific domains during 2007-2011. Two universities have a similar journal publication profile, if they publish in a high number of common journals. This idea led to the possibility of mapping universities and thus offering an...

A new algorithm for image inpainting based on the searching of redundancy for corner points across different scales and orientations is proposed. The searching utilises the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) of the original image. The target region is filled-in following the priority which is given to the corner points that accumulate a high...

Drawing on social choice theory we derive a rationale in which each reviewer is asked to provide his or her second, third, and fourth choice in addition to his/her first choice recommendation regarding the acceptance/revision/rejection of a given manuscript. All reviewers’ hierarchies of alternatives are collected and combined such that an overall...

Here we show a novel technique for comparing subject categories, where the prestige of academic journals in each category is represented statistically by an impact-factor histogram. For each subject category we compute the probability of occurrence of scholarly journals with impact factor in different intervals. Here impact factor is measured with...

This paper presents a new method for comparing universities based on information theoretic measures. The research output of each academic institution is represented statistically by an impact-factor histogram. To this aim, for each academic institution we compute the probability of occurrence of a publication with impact factor in different interva...

In this paper we provide the reader with a visual representation of relationships among the impact of book chapters indexed in the Book Citation Index using information gain values and published by different academic publishers in specific disciplines. The impact of book chapters can be characterized statistically by citations histograms. For insta...

Here we show a comparison of top economics departments in the US and EU based on a summary measure of the multidimensional prestige of influential papers in 2010. The multidimensional prestige takes into account that several indicators should be used for a distinct analysis of structural changes at the score distribution of paper prestige. We argue...

A university may be considered as having dimension-specific prestige in a scientific field (e.g., physics) when a particular bibliometric research performance indicator exceeds a threshold value. But a university has multidimensional prestige in a field of study only if it is influential with respect to a number of dimensions. The multidimensional...

We introduce a novel methodology for mapping academic institutions based on their journal publication profiles. We believe that journals in which researchers from academic institutions publish their works can be considered as useful identifiers for representing the relationships between these institutions and establishing comparisons. However, when...

A journal may be considered as having dimension-specific prestige when its score, based on a given journal ranking model, exceeds a threshold value. But a journal has multidimensional prestige only if it is a prestigious journal with respect to a number of dimensions—e.g., Institute for Scientific Information Impact Factor, immediacy index, eigenfa...

Here we study the relationship between journal quartile rankings of ISI impact factor (at the 2010) and journal classification in four impact classes, i.e., highest impact, medium highest impact, medium lowest impact, and lowest impact journals in subject category computer science artificial intelligence. To this aim, we use fuzzy maximum likelihoo...

Under the assumption of oscillatory behaviour of the difference between coding gain and transmission cost over time, heavy losses may be incurred in the form of foregone transmission opportunities in the future or in the present. It calls for a sustainable transmission path which would then modify the optimal transmission condition accordingly to r...

In progressive image transmission, there exist some risks which may appear during the processing. A first class of risks is the diminishing coding performance when the occurrence of insignificant coefficients at each transmission time is a small-probability event. It may be a catastrophic transmission risk which can lead to major and irreversible b...

Is there any advertisement in a particular dataset more visually efficient than the rest? Here we propose that advertisement images may be rank ordered based on their important information visibility using computational attention.For each one of the advertisement images we first compute a multi-bitrate attention map following a rational model of co...

Here we show a longitudinal analysis of the overall prestige of first quartile journals during the period between 1999 and 2009, on the subject areas of Scopus. This longitudinal study allows us to analyse developmental trends over times in different subject areas with distinct citation and publication patterns. To this aim, we first introduce an a...

Here, we show a longitudinal analysis of the ranking of the subject areas of Elsevier's Scopus. To this aim, we present three summary measures based on the journal ranking scores for academic journals in each subject area. This longitudinal study allows us to analyze developmental trends over times in different subject areas with distinct citation...

We present in this paper a new fusion image scheme called as “Attention Fusion” (ATF). This scheme, developed in a multiresolution space, uses an attention map to define the level of activity for each one of the coefficients and so, to derive the rules of fusion. The multiresolution decomposition is done by using the dual-tree complex wavelet trans...

The objective of image fusion is to represent relevant information from multiple individual images in a single image. Some fusion methods may represent important visual information more distinctively than others, thereby conveying it more efficiently to the human observer. Here, we propose to rank order images fused by different methods according t...

For progressive transmission, the limited bit-reserves of low transmission cost seem to provide a limit to the growing low-cost bit-allocation and to the sustainable amount of significant coefficients for which we allocate our exhaustible low-cost bit-reserves. Following a bit-saving path in the progressive image transmission, bit streams are prior...

Lossy coding, selective seeing, ignoring visual cues, and perceptual biases are different sources of error into the visual communication. To counteract these tendencies we propose a change of paradigm from transmitting important information first to seeing important information first, for the same quality factor.Here we use the new paradigm to the...

Here we describe, in terms of a decision problem, any situation in which a computational system will be forced to allocate attention at any time to one spatial location to improve the reconstruction fidelity on a neighborhood of the chosen point. The result is a rational model of computational attention in which a multi-bitrate attention map will p...

When we study a subject like ldquointroduction to computer programingrdquo with languages like C or C++, some aspects may be considered boring by students. On the one hand, the programs we present often have an ugly aspect due to the fact that we use the command line interface (console) to communicate with user, and on the other hand, these program...

In dynamic allocation quantizers are capable of choosing between limited allocation of bits and bit allocation without restriction. The goal of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the assumptions used in a transmission system which still has quantizers using restrained bit allocation in the long time and in a transmission system for...