How are the peers selected?
For the 2004 Academic Peer Review a large database of respondents was purchased from the World Scientific and 1,300 respondents formed the universe for the first rankings. Since then, things have moved on a bit… and the process runs as follows… 1. Previous respondents are invited to respond again – to update their opinions based on anything they may have learned since their prior response 2. We select 180,000 addresses from the World Scientific database based on balance of field prepresentaion and geography. Previous respondents to the survey are excluded. 3. We select slightly over 13,000 addresses from the International Book Information Service (IBIS) operated by Mardev (a division of Elsevier). These supplement the shortfalls of the World Scientific database – particularly in the Arts & Humanities. Again, prior respondents are excluded. There are two ideas in play to boost the response in the future – one is an academic sign up facility to enable people to volunteer to participa
