A scientific editor’s support tool: Design, analysis and value

This article addresses the requests for an online tool to aid publishers of scientific journals in their work to pre-filter the mass of incoming papers for scientific quality. As a first step the Hamburg EERQI group has analyzed the process of scientific refereeing by developing a detailed questionnaire and asking a group of referees to re-referee a large, preselected stack of previously published scientific papers in educational research (see Gogolin/Stumm in this volume). We proceeded to extract information about the refereeing process from the wealth of statistical data gathered in their survey: We used a linear weighted combination of the detailed accumulated answers, here called intrinsic parameters, to determine the best fit to the overall judgment of the referees on a paper. That is, we try to compare the contributions of the individual aspects to the whole.