Peer Review: A Quality Measure For Journals And Publications

What is Peer Review – Needs And Process:

With so much complexity going into our works, it is always better to have a different set of eyes. Moreso, A person or an organization which goes through our work; The firm looks at the work in a neutral way and points out its area of developments. Broadly, this is the premise of Peer review. Apparently, when we say different people, we refer to individuals who are unconnected. To both you and your work in every way possible. Naturally, we as humans have a particular bias towards what we create.

Technical Peer Review And It’s Features:

Professional peer review focuses on the performance of practitioners, too (or “intending to”) improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In academia, peer review is common in decisions related to faculty advancement and tenure. Having said that, Peer Review is most useful in the research areas, where it pays to be accurate. The simple logic we have here is that sometimes you may overlook some concepts or pointers and end up losing the worth. The quality is important, and it is your responsibility to maintain it. Hence, you can ensure that the works you do, either academic or research types, are always top notch by the review. In this regard, Peer Review is necessary because:

Types Of Peer Review On Need Basis:

1. Scholarly peer review – Which caters to the ideas, theories, concepts and views that the author expresses in manuscripts. Obviously, this is most useful for ensuring Qualitative work in various disciplines. Scholarly Publishing areas follow the methods of Peer Review where manuscript formatting is essential. The manuscripts after the editor checks through is given to reviewers anonymously.
2. Government Review – To Formulate Government Policies without any loopholes and limitations. As a matter of fact, many governments in Democratic nations, invite Peer review for designing the policy. Editors call this review as Open Public Peer review.
3. Medical Peer review – is one another review area which is soon picking up. If you are a medical practitioner, you can draft up your patient case records, and send them for review. Naturally, this helps you see where you can improve your medication and treating facilities. 
4. Journal Peer Review – is another interdependent branch of review systems, for Medical, Scholarly, Academic, Legal and many others. It is not very different from Peer review within Publishing areas. More often than not, both these review systems are needed to get the whole picture. 
5. Professional Peer Review – is in regards with professions like Accountancy, Actuary Policies, Insurance Designs, Product and Campaign publicists, etc. Most of these organizations look to have a separate review board who give their positive areas of developments. 

Process Involved In Peer Review:

Now, that you have a simple idea as to why Peer review is necessary, let’s see how you can implement it in your need. Of course, for the most part, the elements of Peer Review are same. They follow the same path. Hence, you can implement the system in any of your requirements. However, here you will see that the focus is on Peer Review for the Publishing industry. More so, journal publications. Naturally, most of the discussion will be more towards manuscripts. 

Selection of Peers:

Typically, the term Peer means colleagues in work. Although that is true, most Peer review boards consist of industry experts. Rather subject matter experts who deal with your type of manuscripts. Therefore, you can approach editors, reviewers or boards in publishing companies to take your review. Most boards have a period in which to submit. Ensure that the review material is sent within this time frame. Hence, selection of Peers is important. Also, you can approach multiple boards for review. You may have to take care of the permits and review guidelines before doing so. 

What is a Peer-Reviewed Journal: Submission Criteria:

Peer reviewed journal is an article or work which are written by researchers, and other experts review it before such article is given for publishing. To further explain the concept, let us look at the next step in Peer review process.

1. Once you have a list of reviewers who can review your work, you can go for submitting an article.
2. Naturally, you need to pick researchers who deal with the same research as yours. Sometimes this may not be possible. Thus, you can approach a journal editor in this case. The editor, once he has your Journal article, will go through and pick up reviewers.
3. Hence, the process of Peer Review starts with the submission of Manuscript and the peers are your reviewers. This ensures quality observations.

Distribution Of Work To The Reviewers:

The Editor may send Your manuscript to just one reviewer based on the complexity or even two of them. In any case, he will distribute the work logically between them. Generally, in journal publishing, you have two reviewers going through your article.

The following is the criteria by which the editor divides the work:

1. The editor may pass on the work to one of the reviewers basing on the technical aspects i.e.,., Grammatical and Theoretical aspects. 
2. He may look at the Grammatical aspects of the work and comment on the same.
3. Therefore, your first responsibility comes to adjusting the errors if any. Naturally, irrespective of the outcome of the material, you have to make the language as fluent as possible.
4. Similarly, You may have your work with another reviewer for the Theoretical aspects of it.

After all, your content within the journal needs to appeal to the STM (Scientific, Technical, and Medical) guidelines, while also being as original as possible. Also, depending on the publisher, like Elsevier, Springer, PLoS, Nature, PubMed, BioMed Central, Wiley, you need to take care of these elements – Abstracts, Highlights, Statistical Errors, Conclusions/Discussions/Languages and reference. 

Peer Reviewed Articles – Key Aspects:

As we can see, Peer review not only looks to improve quality but overall originality. In this respect, Journal manuscript peer review involves covering the areas of accuracy, relevance, theories validity, etc. Thus, where you prepare your manuscript in agreement with previous theories, you will have to attribute it properly. Attributes involve you giving the credits, annotations, citations and attributes to the original work. You will have to specify the output explicitly. Also, many publishing companies and universities restrict those journals which fail to attribute the sources and citations properly. Hence, you will have to be careful in giving credit where its due.

1. Time – By stages, Short Cycle – Regular review, perhaps 1 Week for completing the initial review.
2. Format – Single Offline Peer review, Pair Online, Meeting with/without Precheck Peer Review.
3. Measurement – No records, record efforts, size of artifacts reviewed, execution of checklist, SPC (Statistics Process Control)
4. Coverage – 100% (High quality requirement), 50% (Suitable for flexible situation) and 30% (low quality requirement)
5. Checklists – Summarise paragraph, impressions, journal specific points, standards, plagiarism, specific page comments.

Allocation Of A Sub-Editor:

1. In review procedures, your project gets a separate editor altogether. The review boards pick a subject matter expert to act as a sub-editor for your project.
2. You get multiple benefits of having a sub-editor, as he reviews all the suggestions. More often than not, having an editor helps, when the said subject is something unique.
3. Apparently, sometimes the reviewers may not have an in-depth knowledge of the subject. Naturally, you can’t expect them to do their research.
4. Instead, to ensure that the review is going on smoothly, a sub-editor goes through the summary of the material and procures knowledge on a need to know basis.
5. Once he has a clear picture of what the material is about, he can drive the reviewers in a fair manner.

Resubmission Of Manuscripts And Review Procedures:

Although these are the steps in Peer review, it is not a thumb rule to follow them in a sequence. You may find that your peer review procedures are a bit different. Now, there maybe some discussion boards, which belief in stepwise procedures. Therefore, they may pass you back the journal after every suggestion from the reviewer. Some review boards look to do the hand back in a sequence manner. Periodically, you may receive your material back. However, to ensure that the necessary adjustments, editors give you sufficient period, the publishers also usually give some inputs for review.

These periods of review are the times when you may take to bring the changes and prepare the journal for the second round of review. This method of analysis works best when the journal is basing on a source material. Thus, the reviewers, have a fair knowledge of what the journal is about. And they can compile their suggestions in an orderly fashion.

How To Tell If An Article Is Peer Reviewed – Checklist:

1. Open Ulrichs Web directory which hosts journal review records.
2. Type the “journal title” in the search box and press enter. Note, Not the article title.
3. In search results, look for a referee jersey icon which contains information about the reviewed journals.
4. Also, you can click on the journal to view the full details, including the tab which says “Refereed Yes.”
5. If so, the journal is peer reviewed.

The Responsibility Towards Peer Reviewed Articles – Final Step:

The researcher’s liability arises from the point where he gets his journal for modification. He will get a fixed period in which he needs to complete the change. Now, because the next set of the review will have different changes, the researcher needs to incorporate the suggestions as soon as possible. Also, the fact that the next review may consist of an entirely new set of reviewers. Hence, the periodical review system helps the researcher, as well as the publisher, ensure that the quality of the journal is never at a loss.

Types Of Peer Review:

With a right understanding of Peer review and the elements involved in the same, let’s now look at the Peer Review types. Although most of the Peer Review process has a similar tone to it, there are differences in the way you do it. Most of these differences are towards presenting manuscripts to the reviewers for review. Depending on the way of handing them your manuscript, you have majorly four types of Peer Review procedures. Let’s look at them in the below list:

1. Single Blind Review:

The crux of getting anonymous reviews is the basis of good peer review. A single-blind peer review keeps the identity of the reviewer anonymous, but the author’s name and affiliation are on the paper. Of course, as with any system, the Single Blind Peer Review has its flaws.

1. While the reviewers’ identity is kept anonymous, they can still see the author. Therefore, for the most part, Single Blind review system fails to get an entirely neutral review. 
2. Most journal publishers claim that Gender bias is still prevalent to an extent in reviewing. Single-blind peer review does not protect the author against gender bias, or any bias for that matter. 
3. All to say, the reviewers here have a free getaway card. 
4. Reviewers may use their anonymity as justification for being unnecessarily critical or harsh when commenting on the authors’ work. 

2. Double Blind Review:

The Double-blind peer review is when the identities of both scholar and reviewer are hidden. If the author’s identity is not known to the reviewer, it will prevent the reviewer from forming any bias. However, even this system has its fair share of advantages and limitations. Let’s have a proper look at them,

1. The concept of Double-Blind review works on maintaining an appropriate and ethical workflow.
2. The idea lies on the very basis of getting a neutral review. Because the said reviewing person does not know who wrote the abstract, you cannot influence their hold in a science and research community.
3. The limitations that we have for this system are the compromise factors. Most of the times, peer review is taken up by people concerned with the same area of expertise.
4. It is possible that double-blind peer reviewing is not blind after all. With some research groups being close knit, it is easy to make a simple guess of who could be the author.
5. Hence, in research areas which are unique, this risk is higher. Once the identity is known, it goes back to being a Single Blind review.
6. For confirming that it is blind, an author may have to shun away any references to their work in the abstract, which may ruin any research upon the paper.

3. Open Review System:

This journal peer review is taken up by the reviewers with the result that the suggestions will be open. The review process is open to view for all those involved. Thus, no concept of being anonymous.

However, the following are the advantages and disadvantages for the same:

1. In open review, reviewers may end up giving very tame reviews for fear of identification.
2. If the reviewer knows that everyone will see their opinions and recommendations, they may not be as critical as if their study was blind. 
3. With Open Review system both of them are in identification. The reviewer knows the author and vice versa. Similarly, if a reviewer is reviewing their colleague’s paper, they may be more inclined to give a good general review than be too critical and because of unnecessary tension in the workplace.
4. One of the better aspects of an open review system is, it highlights who gives the not-so-constructive reviews. Therefore, It is natural that work can build up.

However Open review system is not with its support. Most publishing reviewers have an opinion that this may be the effective way to avoid malicious comments, stop any plagiarism, get reviewers to follow their routine, and encourage open and honest reviewing.

Peer Review Meaning – An Overview:

With Peer review systems in place, your journal will get the utmost quality check.

The advantages of having Peer Review methods are it gives the validity of research based on the expert knowledge of other researchers. Therefore, researchers prevent plagiarism and falsified works, and polish original ideas to make sense.

The review also provides valuable feedback so that researchers can revise and improve their papers. This way you not only get the best quality but also avoid the clash of publication.

In addition to that, Peer Review enables journal editors to select the most relevant findings for publication in their journals, based on independent reviews of an expert group. Most researchers understand the process of peer review. However, there are still some limitations which make Peer Review just almost perfect.

Issues Regarding Peer Review Methods:

Majorly the issues are regarding time and procedures. Most editors usually claim that Peer Review takes long periods of time, and cause lengthy delays in research findings. Additionally, the review methods when consuming too much time places considerable demands on the academic community. There has always been extensive debate as to how efficient the peer review process is in detecting errors in academic papers. Editors sometimes accuse the method, of protecting established opinions and not being open to genuinely new ideas. Ultimately it may not prevent the publication of poor research as review standards may be lower in less prestigious journals.

Preparing the perfect journal is an only half game won. As a scholar, after putting in so much of an effort in making this manuscript, you have the duty to bring it out as well. You will need to ensure that the quality. Hence, you need a professional publishing services company like us. We provide journals publishing by the volume, with the latest tools available in the market. Our expert knowledge base gives us all the insight into the crux and makes the journal. Thus, we ensure that the publication comes out in the best way possible. Drop us a mail now, and give your work the perfect service it deserves.