ONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETINPetty et al. / REVIEW PROCESS AT PSPB The Review Process at PSPB: Correlates of Interreviewer Agreement and Manuscript Acceptance

Reviewer agreement and the predictors of publication judgments were investigated for first-submission manuscripts to the Person-ality and Social Psychology Bulletin during a 3 1/2year period (i.e., one editors tenure).Among the findingswere the following: Reviewers judgments of manuscripts were multi- rather than unidimensional; reviewer agreement about methodology and overall recommendation was greater among high-prestige than mixed-prestige reviewers; authors with high prestige and authors with low professional experience submitted longer manuscripts than their counterparts; author prestige and text length were positively related to publication judgments of reviewers and editors; and author gender was related to editors decisions with female authors receiving less favorable decisions thanmales.The possible mediation of these findings and their implications for understanding the peer-review process in personality and social psychology are discussed. The journal peer-review process is a central feature of most academic disciplines. Given the consequences of the decisions made within the peer-review process (e.g., tenure and salary increments are typically dependent on publication in peer-reviewed academic journals) (Gas-ton, 1978; Hagstrom, 1974; Yoels, 1973), it is not surpris-ing that it has been the focus of much empirical investigation. Although researchers have examined a variety of issues related to the review process, two broad questions have been particularly prominent. Onemajor issue that has received empirical attention has been the extent to which reviewers of the same manuscript agree in their judgments of the quality of the manuscript and the extent to which one ormore dimen-sions underlie these judgments (e.g., Cicchetti, 1980