How Does Peer Review Work?

Peer review, one of the gold standards of science, is an important procedure to evaluate the quality of a manuscript before it is published. It’s a process where “peers”, who are research fellows or scientists assess the quality of other research fellows’ or scientists’ work to ensure the work is extremely thorough, careful, coherent, uses past research and adds to what we already knew.

What is the Peer Review?

Peer Review has grown dramatically in recent years with the advent of new technologies and the demand for rapid publication of scientific articles.

As you know, reviewers play a vital role in scholarly publishing. Specialized reviewing is a process of validating and evaluating specialized papers by experts in the field. Despite the criticisms, peer review is the only widely-used method for evaluating scientific papers.

For example, Elsevier publisher, the world’s leading publisher of science and health information, uses peer review to evaluate the quality and credibility of journals and articles. Peer Review was officially formulated for the first time in the Royal Society nearly three hundred years ago as a way of evaluating articles and journals.

Why Is Peer Review Important?

Peer review is an important system and an integral part of scientific publishing that helps enhance the quality of published research confirms the validity of the manuscript and improves networking possibilities within research communities.

Here are 5 reasons demonstrating the necessity for peer review:

Time for Thought and Reflection

Peer reviewing gives the reviewer time to reflect on another person’s work and to provide helpful feedback using his or her expertise. The reason for applying for a review is that the reviewer’s expertise is relevant to the subject of the article and that his or her knowledge is used to evaluate the work. The authors, who receive feedback from the reviewers, also find out how the expert has evaluated the research work in the same field of study. This is a good opportunity to make the necessary adjustments to the article through an interaction between the author and the reviewer or editor.

Quality of research

In magazines like “Which”, consumers read reviews of products and ratings given to them. Peer-review does the same for scientific publications. Peer review is a form of quality assurance for research consumers.

Researchers Understand Their Ethical Responsibility

We publish our research in the hope that our findings will improve something. In medical research, this may affect people’s health. Therefore, the way we conduct research and the basis on which we base our claims must be examined and reviewed. Authors and reviewers share this moral responsibility.

Training

A Ph.D. student, who has been associated with the peer review process in both author and reviewer positions, says that receiving feedback has helped him enhance and improve his research capacity. He sees peer review as an opportunity for academic interaction. Reviewing others’ researches has helped him look at his own researches more critically.

Collaboration

Peer review helps us feel that we are part of a scientific community. It is satisfying to know that our feedback improves academic work. Also, others may do the same for us. We believe in sharing our sense of cooperation with other reviewers.

Types of Peer Review

When an article, a paper, a manuscript, or any other research work is submitted to a journal, it is evaluated to see if it meets the criteria for submission. In this stage there are three main types of peer review used by different journals and publishers:

Single-blind review

In this method, the reviewer knows the authors’ names, but the authors do not know who reviewed their manuscript unless the reviewers sign the report as they wish. This method is a kind of traditional, but also the most common type of review process of scientific papers. Here are some points to consider regarding single-blind review:

• Since the identity of the reviewer is anonymous for authors, it allows for impartial decisions. The single-blind review allows the reviewer to criticize a research work any influence exerted by authors.
• Authors may be worried that reviewers could delay publication.
• The anonymity of reviewers may lead to the justification that they may have unnecessary or harsh critical comments on the authors’ work.
• There is the potential for discrimination based on gender or nationality.

Double-blind review

In this method, both the reviewer and the author are unaware of each other’s identity, which is more common in the specialized evaluation of social and human sciences’ research papers. Here are some points to consider regarding double-blind review:

• Since the reviewers don’t know the identity of authors, and vice versa, the exercise of personal opinions will be minimized and the reviewing process will be more impartial.
• Authors and reviewers will not be influenced by each other, and are not concerned about being criticized by each other.
• The author’s anonymity may not be ensured in this process, due to his or her research background, the field of research, references, and writing style.
• In many cases, knowing the name of the authors makes it easier to investigate plagiarism or suspected points in the research.

Open-review method

In this method, authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identities. This method is used in some journals. In this way, the final paper may be published along with the name of each reviewer and his or her comments. Here are some points to consider regarding open-review method:

• Transparency in this method reinforces the sense of responsibility among the reviewers. This method will generally lead to a higher quality of articles.
• As the reviewer’s name is published in the papers, they will make more efforts to evaluate the papers thoroughly and accurately.
• Some reviewers may refuse to cooperate with a journal that has an open-review method. This is due to the concern that others are being informed about their comments and evaluations.
• Some reviewers in smaller research communities and in some parts of the world prefer not to evaluate senior researcher papers.