My first reviewing experience: Part IV: The lessons

There are several things that I have learnt from the reviewing process–about choosing journals, writing papers, and the peer review process itself. I wanted to put them down as a last post in this series. However, one disclaimer is due here. Not all of what I say is relevant to the paper that I reviewed; the paper I reviewed is just the starting point for some of these thoughts.

Choosing a journal

There are several factors that goes into choosing a journal to publish one’s results; for example, Doug at Nanoscale views recently identified few of them: impact factor, wider audience, topicality, and time-to-publish. One way to choose is to identify the key papers on which you are building your work, and see if any of the journals in which the key papers are published is suitable for your purposes. However, sometimes, this simple mechanism does not work. For example, if you are building your work on Eshelby’s 1959 paper in Proceedings of Royal Society of London (PRSL), you obviously can not send your paper to PRSL (except in some rare cases, may be). Also, sometimes, you might be picking an important concept from an area, and apply it to a problem in another; so, the target audience you have in mind is different. In such cases, a great care should be exercised in choosing the journal; here again, the journals that you read regularly, and find interesting stuff is the one to shoot for.

Writing the paper

More importantly, once you have chosen the journal, you have to tune your paper to the journal’s target audience. While a wrong choice can lead to rejection and hence delay in publishing, even a right choice can lead to rejection and/or delay if the presentation style is wrong. What makes this process more difficult is the inhomogeneities across different papers within a single journal, and more often than not, within a single volume. Remember that most of the scholarly publications do not go through Scientific American style editing to make sure that some kind of uniformity is maintained across different papers, and hence, depending on the combination of authors, editors and reviewers (not to mention other extraneous factors such as luck, your pedigree, how well known you or your co-authors are in the field, and, worst of all, even your gender) papers differing in style and content make it through the peer review process.

Once a journal is chosen, sometimes, since most of the journals give you the option of picking potential referees (as well as telling them not to send to specific ones), the temptation and tendency to tune your paper with the referees in mind exists — more often than not, this tendency is shown in the choice of references (not to mention that some referees do demand that all their papers be referred to irrespective of relevance or context) — and it should be avoided; for one thing, it is not always assured that the referees would be chosen from your list; even if they are, as Mary-Claire van Leunen put it in her Handbook so eloquently,

Scholarly writing is distinguished from all other kinds by its punctilious acknowledgment of sources. (…)

For the reader, citation opens the door to further information and to independent judgment. He can find more about your topic, fill in the background, catch up on what he’s missed. He can also judge for himself the use you’ve put your sources to. (…)

Citation keeps you honest.

From this point of view, referring to irrelevant papers and papers which you have not specifically used is as dishonest as not mentioning your sources.

Peer review process

Though I have seen and read many books, articles, tutorials, and blog posts about technical writing and presentations, the pieces I have read about peer reviewing are few and far in between.

The fact that peer reviewing is not open and hence there aren’t many samples available for a closer study also makes it difficult for beginners. From that point of view, making reviews open access, I think, will, to some extent, promote uniformity of the review process, and might even bring about some standardisation in the long run.

In my own case, the tendency to edit was too strong and I had to fight it every step of the way–and, I think, barring noting some of the glaring errors (technical or linguistic), it is not the job of the referee to edit a manuscript, though, giving suggestions to the authors is OK.

Finally, I do not know how well known this is: but, there might be some perks to peer reviewing!

By the way, I have always been a vocal advocate of not only open reviews but also for letting the authors know the name of the referee and her/his affiliations. So, when I completed my review, I was wondering if I would want to put my name and affiliation at the end of the report. I realise that the answer to that question is a conditional yes — yes, if the manuscript as well as the review is out in the open for the entire world to see, and, no, if not.

Tags: Peer review