Peer Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities Compared:

This study reviews the literature on peer evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. While the literature has not yet attained sufficient maturity to provide robust prescriptions, this paper identifies different findings that can help the SSHRC in its efforts to help knowledge producers reach broader publics. It adopts a critical stance against authors for whom evaluations based on the quality of the research–as opposed to the social characteristics of the researcher, like gender, race or institutional affiliation–are automatically fair, while not specifying how quality is defined. In contrast, we contend that biases in evaluation against certain categories of people can enter the process of evaluation through the favoring of epistemological styles and other cognitive categories, which might serve as proxies for social characteristics. Some studies support this idea, but their results remain too impressionistic, and more research is needed to assess whether these forms of discrimination are found systematically in peer evaluation. Social-blind procedures of evaluation should be critically assessed. The review then moves to questions about using measures of past evaluations to guide the funding o