Peer review governance in transportation research: a systematic audit of editorial practices across 108 major transportation journals

Peer review is the central governance mechanism through which transportation research establishes credibility, yet the field lacks an empirical understanding of how that process operates in practice. This paper presents a comprehensive, manually verified audit of peer review and editorial practices across 108 major transportation journals. Using direct inspection of journal author guidelines and policy pages, each journal is classified by review model and linked to publisher, impact tier, and open access status. Among journals that explicitly state their review model, single-blind review is the most common (57.6%), while double-blind review accounts for 42.4%. Publisher identity is strongly associated with review model ( p < 0.001 ), while open access status shows no association. Additionally, 8.3% of journals do not disclose their review model, and at least one documented discrepancy exists between publicly stated policy and submission portal language. These findings provide a field-level empirical baseline for understanding peer review governance in transportation research. Taken together, these results suggest that review model choice is a consequential governance decision. The observed pattern of higher single-blind rates among High- and Medium-tier journals, combined with evidence from adjacent disciplines on identity-related evaluation effects, indicates that this choice carries substantive implications for fairness and evaluation consistency. The paper also highlights broader challenges for interdisciplinary transportation journals, including reviewer selection across disciplinary boundaries, the growing internationalization of authorship, and the implications of emerging technologies for peer review practice.