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Peer Review Week 2019: Digest for PhD students and early career researchers

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This week has been the 5th annual Peer Review Week. The subject of peer review is discussed all year round, but it's been fascinating to observe the focussed discussion this week on the theme that gets to the heart of the issue: Quality. Peer Review has long been a cornerstone of academic publishing and a signifier of quality, but evidence of bias towards positive findings and spotlights on flaws, in general, have come to light over the years.

The increased workload on academics, pressures on early career researchers to publish or perish and a lack of recognition for reviewers has also resulted in questions about the sustainability of peer review. Technology inevitably is involved in generating possible solutions to these challenges, but at what cost to quality?

This post will summarise some of the contributions to these topics that have been made this week.

Types of Peer Review. http://reviewers.plos.org/open-peer-review/
It's a common misconception that there is one way to peer review. Blind, where the author is known to the reviewer but not vice versa, or double-blind where neither the reviewer or author is known to one another. In fact, many different forms of peer review have emerged over the years that aim to open up the peer review process, sometimes to discourage bad behaviour and bias or simply to allow more contributors to take part in moulding a better piece of research. The infographic above summarises the different types of review, which would you prefer to see or do in your research? Read more about Open Peer Review on the PLOS reviewers website.


Declaring conflict of interest in peer review. @Editage https://twitter.com/Editage
An invitation from a journal to become a reviewer can be a flattering experience and provide an opportunity to boost your academic career. It can be tempting to just say yes and worry about the consequences later. If one of those consequences is a conflict of interest, which can sometimes take place with no bad feeling intended and especially if a field has a very small number of specialists in it, remember to stay objective. When a potential conflict of interest arises it's important to declare it and await the next suitable paper. The infographic above shows how to spot when a conflict may arise.


Words to the wise! 

Lots of researchers have been sharing their experiences of peer-reviewing and why they do it. Often the message has been to be constructive and supportive in equal measure. Dr. Manu Saunders from the University of New England wrote a particularly poignant post, "Why I don't want to be paid for peer review".

Dr. Heather Staines from MIT Knowledge Futures Group builds upon the subject of Open Peer Review and offers a great insight into emerging experiments and approaches. Read her post, "Making Open Peer Review More Open and Transparent".

Twitter poll on Open Peer Review 

Major survey on quality and trust in peer review

Sense About Science worked with Elsevier on a survey 10 years on from their first major survey of researchers. Their report, "Quality, trust and peer review: researchers' perspectives 10 years on" offers an interesting overview of how scholarly communications has changed dramatically in 10 years, the rise of predatory publishers and variety of research outputs being available (preprints, data, code, etc) are making a significant impact. Despite these changes they found that researchers confidence in peer review has increased. Challenges posed to the industry by researchers in the survey include: 
  1. Ensuring researchers receive clear guidance on how to conduct peer review 
  2. Ensuring researchers get meaningful recognition for reviewing, which relates to the pressing need to overhaul research assessment and evaluation.
  3. A need to leverage technologies to manage the ever-increasing volume of research articles and improve the speed of review. 
  4. Should peer review be extended beyond the research article, which would pose a significant resource challenge?
Sense About Science and Elsevier report published during Peer Review Week 2019

Finally, courses on peer review!

It seems the first point mentioned in the survey challenges above has been addressed by publishers already. Many of whom took Peer Review Week as an opportunity to promote their free courses on conducting peer review. Some highlights of courses include:


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