Starting my career as a peer-reviewer

I was recently approached by a scientific journal to do a peer-review for an article. My initial response was one of surprise, as I’d never been asked to do this before. I had to think about it for a while before I agreed to do it. Was I really ready for this? There were a few things that made me decide I was.

1. The academic community relies on peer-review as a way of judging merit for publication. Two anonymous experts in the field normally review each paper. I’ve published a few papers, so I already have a ‘debt’ of peer-review.
2. One of my supervisors had me ‘co-review’ a paper with him a while ago, to make sure I had some basic training in what to look for.
3. One of the editors for the journal had recently seen my review of another piece of work, and had clearly been impressed enough with my reviewing skills and knowledge of the subject area to recommend me. If they believe in me, I should probably believe in myself!

Having made the decision to do the review, I printed off the paper and saved it up to read and review on an upcoming flight I already had planned. I realised, mid-air and with no Internet available, that I was pretty unprepared in terms of what I should actually put in my review.  How should I construct it? What level of detail should I go into? How could I criticise while remaining polite?

Back on solid ground, I hunted the internet for advice. There are a variety of pages with advice on how to do peer review, but I’m going to give the links to a few I found particularly useful (with thanks to Laura J ‏@chasedbysheep and Lauren Gardiner ‏@IbuAnggrek for pointing me in the direction of the first two).

1. The British Ecological Society have produced a wonderful guide to peer reviewing for early career researchers. It covers everything from what peer review is, how to do it, and the ethics of peer review. I can’t recommend it enough! You can download it here http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/Publ_Peer-Review-Booklet.pdf
2. Dynamic Ecology has a great post on peer review, which I found particularly useful in terms of writing style and constructive criticism http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/advice-how-to-review-a-manuscript-for-a-journal/
3. The Guardian recently published “Peer review: how to get it right – 10 tips” http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/sep/27/peer-review-10-tips-research-paper
4. The Chronicle of Higher Education had one last year called “How to Write an Anonymous Peer Review” http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Write-an-Anonymous-Peer/131475/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

These resources helped me work out how I should structure my peer-review, and gave a guideline for what I should include.

One thing I didn’t see discussed was the generally accepted tendency of new reviewers (and I believe it normally holds true for people new to academic marking as well) to be quite harsh and to have unrealistically high standards. Was I being too harsh in my recommendation for major changes and resubmission? How could I make sure I was being as fair as possible?

In the end, I gave quite detailed comments and divided them up into what I felt were major and minor problems. Everything that was easily fixed, or that was perhaps just me being nit-picky, went under the minor problems heading. For the sake of fairness and politeness I tried to put as many of my points as possible into this category. I was left with a small number of things in my major problems heading, things that I felt might completely alter the interpretation of the results. I also made sure I included some positive comments on the paper, as I do think there were some very worthwhile elements to it. I can only hope that the detail I gave satisfies the authors that their paper wasn’t summarily dismissed, but was given a thorough review.

When I received the decision from the editor, I also got to see the comments from the other reviewer. They have picked up on similar issues to me, and have also recommended major revisions before resubmitting, which is quite reassuring. Hopefully the authors are willing to take on our suggestions, and their paper can be improved and published. No doubt I will be asked to review it again, in which case I look forward to seeing a much stronger manuscript which will be a great addition to the scientific literature.

The background research I had to do for this peer-review meant I ended up spending a lot of time on it. I was quite relieved when I hit the submit button, and could get back to my own work! Just two days later, the same journal approached me to do another one. I guess I’ll have to get used to seeing these requests, as my career develops. I’ll probably say no to some of them, but this most recent one looks really interesting and will give me a chance to consolidate what I’ve learnt about the process. Hopefully I’ll get a bit quicker!