posted on 2018-03-12, 10:50authored byMaciej J. Mrowinski, Piotr Fronczak, Agata Fronczak, Marcel Ausloos, Olgica Nedic
With the volume of manuscripts submitted for publication growing every year, the deficiencies
of peer review (e.g. long review times) are becoming more apparent. Editorial strategies,
sets of guidelines designed to speed up the process and reduce editors' workloads,
are treated as trade secrets by publishing houses and are not shared publicly. To improve
the effectiveness of their strategies, editors in small publishing groups are faced with undertaking
an iterative trial-and-error approach. We show that Cartesian Genetic Programming,
a nature-inspired evolutionary algorithm, can dramatically improve editorial strategies. The
artificially evolved strategy reduced the duration of the peer review process by 30%, without
increasing the pool of reviewers (in comparison to a typical human-developed strategy).
Evolutionary computation has typically been used in technological processes or biological
ecosystems. Our results demonstrate that genetic programs can improve real-world social
systems that are usually much harder to understand and control than physical systems.
History
Citation
PLoS One, 2017, 12 (9), e0184711
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of Management