TY - JOUR T1 - Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/400515 SP - 400515 AU - Dakota Murray AU - Kyle Siler AU - Vincent Larivière AU - Wei Mun Chan AU - Andrew M. Collings AU - Jennifer Raymond AU - Cassidy R. Sugimoto Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/11/400515.abstract N2 - The robustness of scholarly peer review has been challenged by evidence of disparities in publication outcomes based on author gender and nationality. To address this, we examined the peer review outcomes of 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions that were submitted to the biosciences journal eLife between 2012 and 2017. Women and authors from nations outside of North America and Europe were underrepresented both as gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers) and authors. We found evidence of a homophilic relationship between the demographics of the gatekeepers and authors in determining the outcome of peer review; that is, gatekeepers favored manuscripts from authors of the same gender and from the same country. The acceptance rate for manuscripts with male last authors was higher than for female last authors, and this gender inequity was greatest when the team of reviewers was all male; mixed-gender gatekeeper teams lead to more equitable peer review outcomes. Homogeny between the country affiliation of the gatekeeper and the corresponding author also lend to improved acceptance rates for many countries. We conclude with a discussion of mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications. Code and anonymized data have been made available at https://github.com/murrayds/elife-analysisAuthor summary Peer review, the primary method by which scientific work is evaluated and developed, is ideally a fair and equitable process in which scientific work is judged solely on its own merit. However, the integrity of peer review has been called into question based on evidence that outcomes often differ between between male and female authors, and for authors in different countries. We investigated such a disparity at the biosciences journal eLife by analyzing the demographics of authors and gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers), and peer review outcomes of all submissions between 2012 and 2017. We found evidence of disparity in outcomes that favored women and those affiliated within North America and Europe, and that these groups were over-represented among authors and gatekeepers. The gender disparity was greatest when reviewers were all male; mixed-gender reviewer teams lead to more equitable outcomes. Similarly, for some countries manuscripts were more likely to be accepted when reviewed by a gatekeeper from the same country as the author. Our results indicate that author and gatekeeper characteristics are associated with the outcomes of scientific peer review. We discuss mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications. ER -