Page 12 - Straive eBook: Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

12 Straive | Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

Similarly, clicking decline will usually take the invitee to a page where they are asked why they
have declined to review (too busy, out of scope, etc.), as well as being asked to recommend
colleagues as alternate reviewers. Depending on how the system has been configured, these
recommendations may or may not be presented to the editor and JEO when they next check
in on the article — a potentially significant waste of effort.

Suggestions

• Process automated responses to pause reminder emails while invited reviewers
are out of office.
• Implement simple delegation processes.
• Automatically screen recommended alternate reviewers for conflicts of interest
and add them to the reviewer list for editorial approval.
• Regularly analyse the reasons for declined invitations to determine whether
action is needed. For example, high numbers of out-of-scope invitations
suggest an issue with reviewer identification.

Peer review

Once invitees agree to review, they are given access to the article files and a review form. As
with most other aspects of peer review, the structure of the form, time allowed for peer review,
number of reviewers, whether reviewers can see each other’s reports, etc., are all variable by
journal and even more different by discipline.

These differences are the source of many debates around peer review, the most central of
which is what quality peer review looks like and how best to train researchers in the process.
Many large publishers offer extensive reviewer training materials on their websites, and the
introduction of formal mentoring schemes for early career reviewers is exposing less experi-
enced researchers to the process.

Mavrogenis et al. (2020) provide a well-written description of a ‘good’ peer review,
suggesting that it should include comments for the editor, indicate the novelty, identify major
methodological flaws, and identify changes that will allow the article to be improved. They
add that reviews should be “polite, honest and clear”. Bad peer review reports, by contrast,
are described as one that is brief, internally contradictory (e.g., requesting major revisions
without detailing the necessary changes), or requiring significant additional work beyond
the scope of the original research. Lastly, they describe rude peer review as being biased,
impolitely written, or including overly negative or personal comments. Our experience has
shown that the structure of a review report form can help ensure a high-quality, constructive
peer review by guiding reviewers through the requirements (Figure 6).