An Evaluation of the Process of Peer Review

The system of pre-publication editorial peer review (normally known simply as peer review or the referee system) has been used to critique, and hence improve, draft academic manuscripts, and documents such as book proposals, internal corporate reports, research grants and teaching materials for many years. In summary, the submitted documents are sent to one or more carefully selected experts (peers), who are asked to read and comment critically on them. In particular, but not exclusively, reviewers are asked to point out any unjustified claims, improper interpretations and extraneous results to the editors. The reviewer reports help the editors reach a decision as to whether the manuscript should be published, with or without revisions, or not at all. All researchers who have a track record in a certain discipline may be asked to undertake peer reviews. A peer review of a submitted scholarly manuscript is used in two ways. One by the author to improve their nascent work, and secondly by the editors to arrive at a decision (i.e. accept, revise or decline) on submitted manuscripts. There is a very large body of literature on all aspects of the peer review process (e.g. Kassirer and Campion 1994; Rowland 2002; Ware 2008; Ali and Watson 2016). Many of these papers are in journals on the life and medical sciences. This body of literature also includes entire textbooks such as Wager et al. (2002), Hames (2007) and Barczak and Griffin (2021). Recently there has been a tendency for studies on this topic to use experimental techniques, statistical analysis and survey data to analyse the effectiveness of the process (e.g. Fox et al. 2016; Wicherts 2016; Gaudino et al. 2021). In this short article I will review the peer review system, look at the criticisms of it, review how it works in practice, then go on discuss what makes a good review from the perspective of both authors and editors. The piece is principally aimed at helping early career researchers (ECRs) in palynology to understand this procedure, deal with peer reviews of their manuscripts, and guide them when they receive their first review requests.