Category: peer review

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‘Recognition’ for peer review

I must confess. I did that lazy thing by asking on Twitter for something perhaps I could’ve found out with a little more effort (I have also been relatively lax at actually writing this blogpost about it!). However, it actually resulted in something interesting. 

I had just completed a (peer) review for a journal published by Sage and was asked if I wanted to sign up for “Publons” a system that supposedly let you gain ‘recognition’ for your peer reviewing. So, I did sign up but then thought: “hang on…” and this prompted by question on Twitter:

Click through to read the replies. It’s a great sharing of knowledge and expertise around the process of peer review, with plenty of contributions from colleagues with positions as editor in various journals. For example, this from Martin Coward begins to get at some of the issues.

I won’t try to summarise, or indeed embed, all of the things that were said, please do click through for the whole exchange. I do want to, very briefly, reflect upon this longstanding concern with making peer review ‘work’. The concerns that “Publons” purports to address are real. Peer review is the life-blood of academic publishing but is assumed, rather under-valued (by publishers, some colleagues and institutions) and, it seems, the constant frustration of editorial board members. As my former colleague Prof. Martin Weller has observed this labour represents rather a lot of unrecognised and under-appreciated investment.

An attempted ‘technological fix’ is, of course, not new. There have been various attempts to think about this over the years. When I was working with Martin on ‘digital scholarship’ (see his excellent open access book) the trial of an ‘open’ peer review system for Nature was a relatively recent talking point. 

It is not a novel argument but it seems to me that unless and until academics, publishers and institutions stop thinking about lots of forms of labour as a part of a perceived ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘privilege’ of academic life (which I think, if it did ever exist for a few people, is long gone) we are more-or-less doomed to rehearse this debate ad infinitum.

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Reblog> How to Write a Peer Review for a Journal Article – Jack Gieseking

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.

Read the full blogpost.