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What is peer review?

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Peer review can often seem like a bit of a black box, with no clear indications of exactly what’s happening or what’s expected. There can be an element of trial and error to becoming a good reviewer and we’d like to help you avoid that. So, let’s start by talking about what happens in the peer review process (we’ll move on to what’s expected in the next sections of the guide).

Jump straight to:

The purpose of peer review

To understand the review process, it’s helpful to have an idea about the purpose first. There are two main reasons that we send manuscripts through the peer review process:

  1. To improve the manuscript: the first and most important purpose of peer review is to help authors to improve their work. As you may have experienced, having another person look over your work is a great way to get ideas to make it better. By commenting on where arguments could be strengthened, suggesting citations that may have been missed, identifying errors that need to be corrected – all of which we’ll cover in this guide – you’re giving the authors the tools to make their paper the best it can be, even if you’re recommending that a manuscript is rejected.
  2. To help the editor’s decision: your review will also help the editors to decide what content they publish in their journal. While editors will have a broad range of expertise and know the needs of their journals, it’s impossible for them to know everything. They rely on subject experts to review manuscripts, comment on whether methodologies, theoretical approaches etc. are appropriate for the topic, and tell them what will help to advance the field. This is essentially a form of quality assurance for academic publications. It’s also important that publishing decisions are not made solely on the opinions of an editor. While they have the final decision on whether or not a manuscript will be published, the input of reviewers is vital to keep those decisions objective.

The peer review process

You send your manuscript to a journal, it stays with them for a few months and then you get a decision and some comments. But what happens in those few months? Before we get into advice on reviewing a paper, we thought it would be helpful to give a basic outline of the review process. This process will vary between disciplines and even between journals. For the most part though, a manuscript will follow this basic path through peer review:

  1. Submission and initial assessment: when a manuscript is first submitted, it will go through an initial assessment phase. This is often conducted by one of the more senior editors at the journal (the lead editor, editor-in-chief, etc.). They’ll check that the manuscript is within the scope of the journal and meets the journal’s basic standards for quality. If they think that the paper is appropriate for their journal and has the potential to be published, then the manuscript will move on to the next stage.
  2. Review invitations: the second stage of the process is sometimes conducted by a member of the journal’s editorial board, sometimes by an associate editor and sometimes by the editor-in-chief themselves. At this point, they’ll begin considering who they would like to comment on the manuscript and sending out review invitations. We go into more detail on how editors find reviewers in the next section of this guide.
  3. The actual review: after invitations have been sent out and accepted, the actual review takes place. There are generally at least two reviewers for any manuscript, but some journals will require more and others might only need one reviewer for certain types of papers. The rest of this guide will go into detail on what you, as the reviewer, will be doing in this stage.
  4. Review assessment and decision: once all of the required reviews for a manuscript have been submitted, the editor will bring them all together. They’ll weigh up the comments of each reviewer, along with their own thoughts on the manuscript and come to a decision. This decision will then be sent to the authors along with the reviewers’ comments (minus any confidential comments that they have asked not to be passed on). If the manuscript is rejected, the process ends here.
  5. Revision and resubmission: if the authors receive a revise and resubmit decision, they’ll have the opportunity to make changes to their manuscript in response to the reviews. It’s rare for a manuscript to be accepted for publication without going through at least one round of revisions.
  6. Final decision: when the paper is resubmitted, it goes back to step one and repeats the process until a decision of acceptance or rejection has been made. At that point, the authors will either need to submit their manuscript to a different journal or begin the process of preparing their paper for publication.

Where to now?

What is peer review? | Edinburgh University Press