A portrait of the blogger as a peer-reviewer

In a publish-or-perish system of scientific communication, large numbers of articles are written and submitted to journals. Editors face the challenge of finding peer reviewers for all these articles. Scientists who accept invitations to review, usually for free, play a vital role in the system. This gives them a lot of freedom to choose which invitations to accept, and to perform peer review as they wish. 

This blog post states my own current “code of conduct” as a peer reviewer: my answers to questions that arise whenever a researcher receives an invitation to review, or has an article to referee.

Should I review this article?

1. Only review for journals I would publish in. This means the publisher should not be Elsevier, the journal should be open access, should not have obnoxious formatting constraints, should not cost too much to the community, and should publish reviewer reports.

2. See the article’s full text before deciding. And the article should already be available on arXiv as a preprint.

The state and prospects of academic peer review

(A PDF version of this post is available on HAL.)

Peer review plays a crucial role in the communication and management of research. How well is it working? How could it be improved? The answers depend on whom you ask. Here they are debated by seven characters with different points of view.

1. Osman: Now that everyone is here, let us start this debate on academic peer review: should it be strengthened, overhauled, or abandoned? When I arrived, Clementine was already in the room, reviewing a paper and complaining about it. This leads to my first question: is peer review taking too much time and effort? 

2. Clementine: I was indeed complaining, but like most colleagues I realize that peer review is an essential part of our work: this is how we validate each other’s work, this is how we assess its interest and likely impact, and this is how we collectively improve how papers are written. Now, the problem is that so many papers get submitted nowadays, it becomes hard to do a proper job on all of them. Even after declining many invitations to review, I have to be pragmatic and focus on the main question: is the submitted paper worth publishing in that journal? If the paper is obviously good work by well-known people, it can be waved through with minimal scrutiny. If it is mediocre work, the rejection should be short and final – I do not want to get dragged into a technical debate with the authors. If however I am unsure whether the paper should be accepted after a quick first reading, then I need to scrutinize it, and to find a good reason for either rejecting it, or accepting it after some improvements. 

3. Deirdre: So you spend more time reviewing second-rate works than really interesting papers? I am glad I stopped reviewing years ago.