Via Jack Gieseking. Some excellent tips for new and experienced peer-reviewers alike, I think…
How to Write a Peer Review for a Journal Article
As an editorial collective member of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies and as someone who once managed WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly for three years, I know how difficult it is to find appropriate and available peer reviewers. I often seek out graduate candidates (ABD students) who would offer that strong expertise but may not have the have reviewed journal articles or many journal articles before. I remember how awkward and nervous I was–and how many, many hours I devoted (oy)–when I wrote my first peer reviews.
Thanks to various search engines, I’ve read quite a few posts on how to write peer reviews. Many of them are written by publishers, peer review corporations (yeeghads!), or from other academics. These are all helpful in that they structure the work of peer review, but I found the former to be too detailed and formal, and then more anxiety-producing than clarifying. If they were brief, like the academic perspective, I found myself unclear about how they expected to accomplish each step. I’ve cobbled together my own thoughts about how to do a peer review that comes from my own experience as a gesture of support and solidarity for graduate students, postdocs, and early career researchers engaged in critical and radical research who wish to be part of the project of producing knowledge through peer review. My own take as a social scientist offers an organized response through the parts of–surprise!!–a social science paper, which I have not found mention of as of yet.
Before I go on, my first tip is that each peer review should take no more than two to six hours. If you spend the maximum number (6) on your early peer reviews, then that number should significantly decrease over time as you perfect your own approach to reviews. A six-hour review imagines you read the paper three times and then type up your notes. My second tip is that your entire review can be a page, preferably, or two pages long. You’re wondering if I’m serious but how would you feel if you wrote a 20-page paper over months and someone gave you five pages of single-spaced feedback? Exactly. One or two pages is a lot to chew on. Finally, as you read think about making summary comments and identifying trends (in style a la too many commas or overciting, in writing a la a vast absence of methods, etc.) rather than line edits.