It’s a Monday morning and you’re still caffeinating when you see an email appear in your inbox: your scientific paper has been conditionally accepted, pending eight pages of suggestions, requests, and demands for clarification. One reviewer seems to take umbrage at your methodology, your choice of literature, your conclusions, and well… everything. Your heart sinks.
Depending on the paper, the people, the field, and the journal, responding to reviews can take anywhere from days to months, and sometimes even years. Why is the peer-review process so arduous, and what can scholars do to persist through it?
Peer review is essential, but not infallible
Reviewers and editors take their jobs seriously and for good reason: the thorough evaluation of a scientific work by others is meant to safeguard the scientific record. However, like science itself, peer review is not infallible. Legends abound of meanly worded attacks hiding under a thin veneer of scholarly concern; studies of the peer-review process have found that unprofessional reviews can cause lasting harm to authors. Fortunately, those same studies have also shown most peer reviews to be well intentioned, even if they don’t always seem that way at the first glance.
Read on for tips to persevere through and respond to peer-review comments.
1. Expect misunderstanding
To ensure the peer-review process is free of bias, most journals today use either “single-anonymous” (formerly known as “single-blind”) or “double-anonymous” reviews to keep identities confidential. Whichever type, the reviewer is not to have prior knowledge of the reported research.
Unfortunately, this approach often results in a sort of “Murphy’s Law” of communication: if something can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood. A process that asks busy reviewers to decipher complex scientific papers they are unfamiliar with will amplify any weaknesses a paper has. Reviewers describe such weaknesses entirely in writing. Without visual or auditory cues to accompany written reviews, critiques seem even harsher to the reviewee.
Remind yourself to expect misunderstanding when that email arrives in your inbox. Remind yourself again (and again, as needed) as you read through the reviewer comments.
2. Acknowledge your own reactions
Let’s face it, even constructive criticism stings. Put the comments away. Archive the email temporarily if it helps. If applicable, talk with a co-author about which comments to address first. Return to the comments with a sense of purpose.
3. Think like a reviewer
Just as reviewers are guided to “put yourself in the place of the author,” it can be useful for authors to consider what the experience was like for the reviewer reading their paper.
How often have you read someone else’s work and been totally confused? If you’re like me, you find it hard to strike the right tone (supportive, but not patronizing) when you’re asking for clarification or justification of ideas. The same goes for reviewers.
Ask yourself, “Is the reviewer making a valid point, even if it sounds harsh?” Although you may know what you are trying to say, the reviewers can’t read your mind—all they have are the words on the page.
Consider the responsibilities set out for your reviewers and the questions they must ask themselves: Is the work reported reliable? Does the reporting provide adequate detail?
Then ask the same questions of yourself: Does your work provide adequate context for the reader? Could you have worded it more clearly?
4. Think like an editor
The best piece of advice I ever received from an editor was, “Make my life easy.” Easy to an editor doesn’t mean brief—it’s more about being thoughtful and thorough. Respond carefully to every one of your reviewer’s comments, and if you made changes in your manuscript, explain exactly what changes you made and where.
5. Consider peer review as a scholarly “test market”
The true test of a research paper is not how quickly it gets published but how widely it gets read. When the science is sound, peer review provides an opportunity to “test” a paper’s ideas on a representative group of readers (or the “test market”), and an opportunity to refine how those ideas are presented.
It can be frustrating if reviewers’ comments suggest they didn’t fully understand the points you were trying to make. It helps to think of peer review as a chance to uncover alternative ways in which your writing could be interpreted (or misinterpreted) and make changes now, before the paper goes out to a wider audience.
You’ve got this
Complex ideas, detailed written criticism, and participants that are passionate about a topic: the things that make peer review effective also make it challenging. However, reviewers and editors provide an essential service to the advancement of science. Even reviews that seem less helpful on the surface nevertheless offer useful insight into the thought processes of skeptical peers.
So, before you open the next “decision” email, remember: scientists, including yourself, are human—and not all humans see things the same way. However, you now have a handful of problem-solving options for when this happens. You’ve got this.
