Peer review processes and advice for authors (2021 Peer Review Series, part 2 of 3)
Welcome to the second installment in our three-part series on peer review.
Last week we introduced peer review and shared some perspectives on its importance to scholarly research and what makes a good review.
This week, we’re again joined by four lead editors of scholarly journals:
Dr Esther Levy, Wiley (Editor-in-Chief, Advanced Materials Technologies)
Prof William Locke, Director of the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, UoM (Founding Joint Editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education)
Prof Norie Neumark, Honorary Principal Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, UoM (Founding Editor of Unlikely: Journal for the Creative Arts)
Prof Simine Vazire, Professor of Psychology Ethics and Wellbeing at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, UoM (Editor-in-Chief of Collabra: Psychology)
In this post we’ll be getting these experts’ perspectives on the different kinds of peer review out there and what high-quality peer review looks like. They also offer some valuable advice for authors who might be preparing their work for review or preparing to receive reviewer reports.
Different kinds of peer review
There is no uniform approach to how peer review is conducted, with processes varying greatly between journals and disciplines. Some degree of anonymity between authors and reviewers is common. In single-blind peer review, most common in STEM disciplines, authors don’t know the identities of their reviewers, although reviewers can know theirs. In double-blind peer review, more common in the humanities, the reviewers are given anonymised manuscripts and neither authors nor reviewers know each other’s identities. In open peer review, by contrast, there is not usually any anonymity, although approaches to, and definitions of, open review vary greatly. Journals also vary in who they will contact for peer review – that is, who they consider ‘peers’ – and may look for particular experiences or qualifications among those they invite to review. We asked our contributors why it’s important for authors to be aware of how a journal conducts its peer review.
Prof Locke: You need to know how the review process is framed so that you can help the reviewers see how your work meets the aim of the publication (journal or book, for example).
Prof Neumark: It’s important because researchers need to know that the reviewers are genuine peers, who are open to innovative work in the field. For creative artists, for instance, it’s important that reviewers recognise creative practice as research.
Dr Levy: To ensure it meets your values and expectations. So you can prepare your manuscript accordingly and be prepared for the level of rigorousness and likely timeline.
It’s important to do your due diligence when deciding where to submit your research. Make sure you understand what peer review process is employed and what standards they maintain throughout this process. Unfortunately, not all peer reviews are of a high standard, with some approaches being opaque and of questionable quality. Prof Vazire emphasises the importance of taking a critical look at journals’ standards of peer review, advocating for more transparent processes.
Prof Vazire: We shouldn’t assume that just because a journal is well-respected or highly cited, that means its peer review process is thorough. Indeed, we’ve seen many examples of really problematic papers making it through peer review at even the most selective journals. Journals that reject over 90% of submissions still publish papers with flaws that are readily apparent to careful readers, and publish findings that cannot be replicated despite diligent efforts by replicating teams. Unfortunately, there’s usually no good way to check how rigorous and thorough the peer review process is at these journals, because most of them don’t make their process transparent. Many of them even forbid authors from sharing their own decision letters and reviews publicly (there is some ambiguity in what the rules and laws are around this, but it’s a pretty commonly accepted norm in many fields). So there’s no way to hold journals accountable – their peer review process happens in secret, and any patterns of bias, shoddiness, or even corruption can’t easily be caught or exposed.
Some journals are moving towards ‘transparent peer review’ – where the peer review history is published (sometimes subject to the authors’ and/or reviewers’ consent) along with the published papers. This is definitely a step in the right direction. A more extreme form of transparency and accountability is overlay journals, where the peer review happens completely out in the open, overlayed on preprints that are already publicly available during peer review. In my opinion, we should place more trust in journals that take these steps and give readers a chance to hold them accountable for the quality and fairness of their peer review process.
You can read more about how Prof Vazire has put these values into practice at Collabra: Psychology in her Peer Review Week interview with University of California Press.
Advice for researchers facing peer review
Receiving reviewer reports can be pretty daunting for authors. We asked our contributors if they had any advice for authors facing peer review.
Prof Neumark: If you receive very negative feedback that is not constructive but feels like control and gate-keeping or self-promotion by the reviewer, you might ask the editors for another review or for more expansive and useful feedback.
Prof Locke: Worry less about criticism and rejection, and more about how it will help you to improve your writing and your research.
Dr Levy: Treat peer review as a conversation between yourself, the editor and reviewers aimed at publishing your piece of research in the best possible form and in the most appropriate journal. Select a journal whose readership will be interested in your work. Pay attention to the messaging in your manuscript, aiming for a scientific narrative that structures and binds the motivation and results together into an integrated picture. Disclose any conflicts of interest and let the editor know if you would like anyone to be excluded from reviewing your paper. Try not to take criticisms of your work personally; use the reviewer reports to improve your paper. If you disagree with a comment, still consider revising the article to clarify your argument. Be respectful and polite when responding to peer reviewers or editorial decisions. Above all, be realistic.
When it comes to double-blind peer review, where the author’s identity is meant to be unknown to the reviewers, it is important for authors to prepare their manuscripts accordingly, as Prof Locke and Dr Levy note.
Prof Locke: It’s your responsibility for keeping your identity unknown, for example, by making sure any self-referencing is kept to a minimum and concealed.
Dr Levy: Write the manuscript in such a way as to disguise your identity.
So if you’re preparing work for double-blind review, ensure you don’t give away your identity in the manuscript, either in the main text or in footnotes/endnotes.
Join us again next week for the final installment in our 2021 Peer Review series, where we’ll look at emerging trends in peer review and what’s in store for the future.
Leave a Reply