Why authors believe that reviewers stress limiting aspects of manuscripts:The SLAM effect in peer review

This manuscript describes a preliminary study examining judgments of author s and reviewers regarding manuscripts that have been either accepted or rej ected for publication. Consistent with hypotheses, results reveal that part icipants believe that their own manuscripts are superior to others' manuscr ipts in terms of general, theoretical, and methodological quality. Relevant to the presumed tendency among reviewers to stress limiting aspects of man uscript's (SLAM), reviewers exhibited greater agreement with editorial deci sions favoring rejection, relative to those favoring acceptance, These find ings suggest that authors' beliefs in reviewers' tendencies to SLAM can he partially understood in terms of authors' unrealistically favorable and opt imistic beliefs regarding their manuscripts and in reviewers' actual tenden cies to be quite critical-at least more critical than editors.