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Scientific peer reviewing: practical hints and best practices
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Spyns Peter / Vidal Mara Esther
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Springer International Publishing
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2015
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Cham;Switzerland;New York
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The concept of peer reviewing -- Characteristics of a good reviewer -- Tips and tricks -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Selected literature and links.

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Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Peter Spyns and Mara-Esther Vidal Scientific Peer Reviewing 10.1007/978-3-319-25084-7_1

1. The Concept of Peer Reviewing

Peter Spyns 1 and Mara-Esther Vidal 2

(1)

Dept. of Economy, Science and Innovation, Flemish Government, Brussels, Belgium

(2)

Computer Science Department, Universidad Simn Bolvar, Baruta, Caracas, Miranda, Venezuela

1.1 What Is Peer Reviewing About?

1.1.1 The Role and Function of Peer Reviewing

Scientific activities and scientific endeavors at regular points in time have to prove their reason of existence: why would anybody put time and money into some aspect related to science and continue to do so, and how is one able to determine the most effective methods, the best results, and the most likely promising research topics or directions? The basic idea is that only fellow researchers or peers are able to perform this kind of quality control, as they are the only ones who are equally intensely involved in the subject or sufficiently knowledgeable to redo experiments and falsify/verify the original outcomes or the research hypotheses.

Peer reviewing serves to guard the quality standards of scientific activities at several points in time and acts as a particular form of social pressure and self-regulation through reputation management. At the start, usually a project or grant request is only awarded funding after a positive peer review. Subsequently, at regular intervals (e.g., two-yearly or halfway through the project), an intermediary review determines whether or not the activities are on track. At the end, a final evaluation tries to assess to what extent the goals have been achieved. At each stage, researchers may submit papers for publication, which are again reviewed by their peers for inclusion in a journal or book or for presentation during a conference or workshop, and further publication in the venue proceedings. Each time, peers are the persons who examine and assess the quality and validity of the submissions. Peer reviewing is thus not only an important external quality control process, but it is also one of several ways to prevent scientific fraud.

1.1.2 The Importance of Peer Reviewing

As peer reviewing is an integral part of a scientific career, one would expect that Ph.D. students receive training in the matter, just as nowadays courses on scientific writing and presenting are provided in the context of innovative doctoral training. However, just as earlier on a Ph.D. student acquired scientific writing skills through on-the-job training, peer reviewing still seems to be lacking in the majority of the formal doctoral training schemes. Many research groups frequently organize internal paper discussion sessions during which members of the research group discuss new and important articles in their field. These sessions are the closest related activity to peer reviewing, but usually these sessions are not really focused on the process of peer reviewing as such but rather on the advance of the state of the art.

Peer reviewing primarily is a free service to the scientific community, submitters, and reviewers as no direct benefits or compensations are offered to a reviewer. But it does benefit a reviewer albeit indirectly: by examining how others tackle a problem, write a proposal, organize a study, report in a certain manner, or develop a scientific argument, a reviewer is able to learn and improve his/her insights and expertise. Furthermore, peer reviewers have to examine closely within a given time frame a new paper, an innovative proposal, or a challenging grant request and produce a coherent and solidly founded assessment and recommendations for improvements. This activity motivates reviewers to improve their analytical skills and expand their vision of a particular domain of knowledge. As a result, reviewers will write better scientific papers, proposals, and reports.

Peer reviewing is also important from a policy point of view. It functions as a quality assurance process: peers screen and review the intrinsic quality of items submitted for screening so that only excellent ones are accepted. As an instrument for quality control, it not only concerns papers or proposals in the scientific domain but also applies to other themes, such as institutional policies. For example, innovation and science policy and instruments can be reviewed by peers. Peers are then considered in their broadest sense, namely, persons active on the same topic (e.g., civil servants of one country assess the science policy of another country with an advisory purpose). Peer reviewing has outgrown its strictly scientific context and has become a general assessment principle.

One of the priorities of the European Research Area, namely, efficiency of research systems, relies on peer reviewing of research proposals as an instrument to organize competitive funding with the aim to raise the level of excellence. Hence, young researchers, who later on in their career might be invited for evaluation panels and program committees, should become familiar with peer reviewing and receive some form of structured training in the matter.

1.2 How Does Peer Reviewing Work?

The main purpose of peer reviewing is to deliver an objective and neutral assessment of a submission that is shared by more than one reviewer and that covers multiple points of views. The traditional way of performing peer review is called blind (cf. Sect. ). Modern social media technologies facilitate these new trends.

1.2.1 Blind Reviewing

Typical of the regular reviewing process is that the identity of the reviewers is not disclosed to the submitters. Reviewers can anonymously express their opinion in all freedom without having to bother with potential fallout or some form of retaliation. To prevent reviewers from abusing their position and to guarantee a variety of points of view as well as a sufficiently consensual final opinion, usually three or an odd number of reviewers examine the same submission. If the submission includes the identity and affiliation of the submitters, the reviewing process is called single blind. If the identities of both reviewers and submitters are not disclosed, the reviewing process is called double blind. Double-blind reviewing is considered as an extra guarantee that reviewers operate with an open mind and are unbiased toward the identity of the submitters. For example, reviewers sometimes hesitate to assess negatively or reject submissions by well-reputed researchers or researchers they (personally) know well.

Another measure to enhance the objectivity and neutrality of peer reviewing is to hide the reviews and/or identity of the reviewers to the other reviewers. Again, the underlying principle is that a reviewer performs the review in an independent and autonomous manner without being influenced by other reviews beforehand (cf. Sect. ). Often, once he/she has entered his/her review, a reviewer can have access to other reviews of the same submission. To avoid that reviewers might be impressed by reviews of well-known researchers and subsequently adapt their review, the reviewers identity is not always shared among the reviewers. In case of strongly diverging or opposed opinions, a chair or editor can organize a (moderated) discussion among those reviewers. It is the choice of the chair or editor to disclose or not their identities to these reviewers.

1.2.2 Arguments in Favor

The most important argument to organize the scientific quality control mechanism as a reviewing process by peers is that members of the scientific community (the peers) are the best to judge the work of a colleague. Usually only other researchers on the same topic or in the same domain have acquired enough expertise and knowledge of the area to be able to judge and assess the work of a colleague. In principle, peers participate in the reviewing process as a service to science in general: no personal benefits are acquired by reviewing.

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