If the reviewer feels the authors have made the required changes and the paper is suitable for publication, they may endorse it. Alternatively, if it is felt that the authors have not or cannot bring the paper up to standard, reviewers can recommend that it be rejected. Reviewers are the crucial facilitator between the author and the handling editor. From a position of expertise, reviewers guide and enable fellow researchers to get their work out into the world, in the best condition it can be.
To support our reviewers, we have put together some tips and lists of things to consider when getting ready to review, and in writing a fair and constructive review. When you receive an invitation to review, it is important to consider the following points before accepting:.
Think about whether the manuscript is suitably within your area of expertise. If not, please decline the invite, and consider helping us by suggesting alternative relevant experts. We strive to keep our peer review process efficient and as such reviewers are requested to complete their reports within 7 days after they accept the invite. Once the invitation is accepted, as a reviewer you will be asked to complete a short questionnaire regarding conflicts of interest to establish any relationship with the author s of the manuscript which may make it inappropriate for you to review.
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We will be happy to assist. In general, you should avoid giving the impression that you couldn't be bothered to carry out the additional experiments or analyses that the reviewer asks for. In some cases, if the reviewer makes detailed or very insightful suggestions that get incorporated into the revised manuscript, it may be appropriate to add to the Acknowledgments section an explicit "thank you" to the reviewer. Indeed, many authors routinely include an acknowledgment of the reviewers in all of their publications.
Sometimes reviewers simply ask for too much. It is certainly acceptable to say that the requests go beyond what you perceive to be the scope of the current work. However, it is also important to recognize that the scope of a given manuscript is often difficult to define precisely. If the reviewer asks for 10 things, and you say that 9 out of 10 of them fall outside the scope of your work, then you are not likely to satisfy the reviewer. In such a situation, you may need to do a few things that you think fall outside the scope of your original work.
Occasionally, it may be necessary to fall back on the discretion of the editor. For example, editors often ask that authors shorten their manuscripts, whereas reviewers often ask for additional details, experiments, or analyses. If, for example, a reviewer asks you to move some content from the supplement to the main manuscript, you may want to say that you are willing to do so if the editor concurs. When you make a change in response to a reviewer's comment, it can sometimes be difficult to convey to the reviewer exactly what that change consisted of.
A common error is for an author to respond to a reviewer's comment by saying, "This point is addressed in the manuscript in the following way…" This response fails to make clear whether the author is simply pointing out text that was already present in the previous version of the manuscript, or the author is describing changes that have been incorporated into the new version.
In your response, refer explicitly to the previous and revised versions of your manuscript and explain what changes have been made. This document can be helpful to you and your coauthors as you decide how to formulate a final response document. The initial document can also be a place to vent your frustration with what you perceive to be unfair or rude reviews. After writing this initial draft, you can begin writing a completely separate document that contains what you actually want the reviewers to see.
In practice, it is often helpful to write the "venting" version of the response first, wait a while, and then begin working on the "real" response several days later, perhaps after you have done some of the work to address the critiques raised by the reviewer.
In addition to the "response to reviewers" letter, you may in some cases want to write a separate letter to the managing editor. In this letter, you can address issues about potential conflicts of interest. You may also want to point out when the reviewers' requests conflict with one another or with journal policies. The process of responding to reviewer critiques can be one of the more stressful parts of the publication process.
I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback nor am I likely to achieve my goals. Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working —a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase—I need to know. Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone.
I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess.
For example, a teacher might say,. The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier? As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.
Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching. Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people.
The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it. Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means. The word was vague! Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it—either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects.
In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball! And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning. That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information.
I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape—captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment. Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information.
Thus, "Good job! We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.
Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway.
The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student. Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals.
That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count? Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.
Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter.
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