Understanding authors' psychological reactions to peer reviews: a text mining approach

Peer reviews play a vital role in academic publishing. Authors have various feelings towards peer reviews. This study analyzes the experiences shared by authors in Scirev.org to understand these authors' psychological reactions to several aspects of peer reviews, including decisions, turnaround time, the number of reviews, and review quality. Text mining was used to extract different types of psychological reactions of authors, including affective processes and cognitive processes. Results show that authors' psychological responses to peer reviews are complex and cannot be summarized by a single numerical rating directly given by the authors. Rejection invokes anger, sadness, and disagreement, but not anxiety. Fast turnaround arouses positive emotions from authors, but slow peer review processes do not increase negative emotions as much. Low-quality reviews lead to a wide array of negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, and sadness.