When Peer Review Works

One of the many functions of the university is to be a producer of new knowledge. Therefore as professors, one of our responsibilities is to contribute new knowledge to our fields of study. We mainly do this in two ways: through presentations at conferences or other institutions (posters or seminars), and through publishing our work. Peer review is the standard by which many journals decide whether or not to publish the work. When I submit a manuscript to the journal, the editor sends it to anonymous reviewers who are knowledgeable in the field to critique the paper and determine if it should be published. The reviewers send their comments to the editor who then decides what happens to the paper. It can be accepted outright, it may have promise but require revisions, or it may be rejected.

Different journals have different aims and guidelines. An article that is suitable for one journal may not be suitable for another. It is also typically more difficult to get articles published in more prestigious journals. Some journals have a more elaborate peer-review process. Some journals are known to go through the process quickly, and others can be very slow. Some journals are expensive to publish in, and others cost the author nothing. My favorite go-to journal has efficient editors, well-suited content-wise to the majority of my projects, and doesn’t charge me (the author). Most of my articles are sent there.

I recently had an article accepted that exemplified when the process worked well. (It doesn’t always.) After preparing my manuscript, I sent it to the journal editor. Within a day, I receive a notice that my article has been assigned to an appropriate associate editor (there are many for journals with a larger readership). A month later, I received the reviews. In this particular case the reviewers understood my paper, provided critical comments, raised issues that needed to be addressed, and classified it in the “publishable, but requires revision” category. The issues raised were important, and I was able to make the necessary modifications and clarifications to address them, which in my opinion led to a much better paper. I sent these back to the editor, who sent it back to the reviewers. About 3 weeks later, the editor sends me the second round reviewer comments. (They were happy with the changes made and thought I sufficiently addressed the concerns raised.) The paper was accepted. I received the proofs in less than a week, and was able to turn things back to the journal in a day or two. All told, a roughly 9-week process.

It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it takes a while to hear back from reviewers (and hence the editor). I’ve had things take 6-9 months in the worst cases. Sometimes the reviewer completely misunderstands the article and “trashes” the work out of ignorance. Sometimes you don’t get much response because the reviewer didn’t do much work. Instead you get short comments such as “this paper was great” (unclear if it was actually read, and I don’t think my papers are that great) and “this paper is poor work” (with no accompanying explanation or justification). Sometimes you get both in the same review cycle, i.e., different readers came to very different conclusions. You’d think that knowledgeable scientists could generally agree on whether an article was good or poor, if it’s not controversial. (My work uses straightforward methods to solve interesting but relatively straightforward problems. The assumptions and approximations made are all very clearly stated too.) Most of the time, I don’t run into problems getting an article published, but every now and then I do for strange, possibly even capricious reasons.

This time around, the reviewers were particularly lucid and helpful, the editors were quick and fair, and my faith in the peer review process was renewed. For my undergraduate student researchers, this is often their first paper so it’s very exciting. (It usually takes 1-4 years of work to get enough results to publish, so not many undergraduates are co-authors on more than one paper.) I forward my correspondence with the editor to the students so they see and understand how the process works. Their excitement is one of the things that keeps me going, because it takes quite a bit of work to get one’s research into a form that will make it through the peer review process of a decent journal.

It’s nice when things work the way they should!