The Hawthorne effect in journal peer review

Purpose—this paper aims to look at the Hawthorne effect in editorial peer review. Design/methodology/approach—discusses the quality evaluation of refereed scholarly journals. Findings—a key finding of this research was that in the peer review process of one and the same manuscript, reviewers or editors, respectively, arrive at different judgments. This phenomenon is named as “Hawthorne effect” because the different judgements are dependent on the specific conditions under which the peer review process at the individual journals takes place. Originality/value—provides a discussion on the quality evaluation of scholarly journals.