A new measure to rank and rate academic reviewers

Bianchi and colleagues have created the F3-index to measure the contribution of reviewers to scholarly journals in terms of report delivery time, length of the report, and alignment of recommendations to editorial decisions.

The authors tested their index on a dataset of peer review in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, including 544 reviewers on 606 submissions over 6 years. The authors say their index can be extended to other dimensions, and parameters can be weighted differently depending on the context of the journal and the data available. They suggest editors could use the index to identify and recognise the most active reviewers, and to assist with reviewer selection.