"First, have colleagues pre-review your manuscript before submission. This was a time-honoured norm in publishing, but has diminished in recent years. Its decline could be due to increased pressure to publish quickly, competition between colleagues, increases in the numbers of co-authors on papers, and ironically, less time available to comment on our colleagues' papers because we are submitting and resubmitting more of our own papers."
"...journals could require a statement in the cover letter such as 'We confirm that should our study have been previously submitted to another journal, we have taken all reviewers comments into account in revising our manuscript for submission to…', has the merit of increasing author awareness and responsibility, without biasing editors because all submissions, whether or not previously rejected, would have to carry this statement."
"Our experience has been that, when they are chosen appropriately, students and post-docs are very conscientious and thorough in preparing reviews. Moreover, this is a route by which a busy senior scientist can still participate in the review process, and can mentor younger scientists in the craft of writing a good manuscript review."
Amen, my ecological brothers! (The authors are Michael Hochberg, Jonathan Chase, Nicholas Gotelli, Alan Hastings and Shahid Naeem)
I could not agree more with each of these points. As a reviewer I am constantly amazed by the shoddily prepared manuscripts that people submit to journals... and I wonder if authors had to first reveal their draft to their colleagues, who vote on their career advancement, whether the manuscripts would be in better shape even before the internal pre-review.
The authors' second point is remarkably creative, and something I would never have thought of (and something I have not heard anyone else mention). We all have been asked by multiple journals to review the same paper, and when you see that the authors did not revise the manuscript AT ALL in response to your first, rejecting review... it creates resentment. For those of us who take the time to write detailed, constructive reviews, this will offer us a direct recourse. If an author is caught in the act of wantonly ignoring a previous round of review, the reviewer can document this and affect change. Perhaps the authors will be blacklisted at that journal -- a concrete negative effect of not taking advantage of the first round of reviews. However, I do not think all reviewer's comments should affect change in a manuscript, so this policy has to be employed with some common sense by editors. I wouldn't hang up an author for not changing figure formatting that I had previously suggested, but I might talk to an editor about authors who ignored cogent criticism of their statistics.
And finally, how can we teach our students to become competent reviewers if we don't expose them to the process? Because too many scientists take their own peer reviews so negatively, I don't think that's the best way to teach younger scientists how to critique and improve papers. Plus, younger scientists often take the responsibility of reviewing to heart, and spend inordinate amounts of time on their first reviews, checking references more diligently than the busy senior scientists could have time to do.
These aren't a panacea for the problems of peer reviewing, but I would wholeheartedly endorse both the cultural and official changes to review suggested by Hochberg et al.
2 comments:
I agree that students would be better at checking the validity of claims in most papers. They're much more aware of the literature in my field, where most PIs get their information from meetings so gossip becomes "truth" without any fact-checking in between.
So do the PIs who wrote this actually tell the journals to put their students and postdocs into the editorial database as contacts? Or do they take credit for their students and postdocs actually writing the reviews? I've posted about this repeatedly and sometimes I get several comments from people saying "That never happens! Students aren't reviewing my papers!"
Oh, but they are. You just don't know because it's ALL ANONYMOUS.
Anyway these three things sound like good advice to me. But I still think the practice of anonymous review leading to having the same reviewers at different journals KIND OF DEFEATS THE PURPOSE OF HAVING DIFFERENT JOURNALS (or peer review, for that matter).
But this whole issue hits too close to home for me right now, so I'll stop there. (suspended rant)
Yet another reason why students and postdocs make good peer reviewers -- thanks Ms.PhD!
Whether students/postdocs get credit for reviews seems to be highly dependent on the culture of a field. In Ecology it's not unheard of for PhD students to write single-authored papers based on their dissertation research... that's right, the PI is merely acknowledged, and isn't an author unless s/he contributes intellectually to that manuscript. That's certainly is not the culture in my subfield, where an advisor who provided the stipend and the lab space would absolutely be an author on his/her students' papers. I imagine this creates a lower barrier to having students as official reviewers in ecology journals than your average biology journal. But I was an official reviewer for a couple of (non-ecology) journals before I got my PhD. Having done a masters and/or published several papers in a field appears to be the top reason grad students are asked to be reviewers.
As far as the same authors reviewing for multiple journals, I think this usually happens because the authors suggest the same potential reviewers in multiple submissions. Rarely would two (or more) editors be so aware of the literature in a subfield that they would send it to the same reviewers on their own. I suppose this means most authors assume that their rejected MS hadn't gone to their hand-picked list of potential reviewers the first time... but certainly there's reason for authors to mix up their suggested list between submissions.
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