I recently wrote about rookie mistakes I made preparing my first submission to an academic journal. A learning experience certainly, and with any luck my paper won’t get an outright rejection since I put quite a bit of effort into selecting the journal in question. Only time will tell.
A couple of weeks later I was very surprised to receive an email from the journal editor that opened with “I would be grateful for your views on the above manuscript.” It was a Sunday night and reading through the email I wondered why my views were requested. I have to admit that I was flattered and when I shared the info with a friend, a published researcher, her response was that she got such requests all the time when her paper had been published. I can understand that but in my case I’m not a published researcher (yet, but working on it!). Still flattered, I looked at the manuscript and figured that since the topic aligned somewhat with the paper I had submitted, along with my experience of supervising MSc research students, I could offer some value to the paper. Someone would be doing the same for me in the future was my rationale so this would be an opportunity to pay it forward, as the term goes. Thus, I accepted the invitation.
The following Saturday I allocated a number of hours to the process, but by this time imposter syndrome had set in. Eeek, am I experienced and qualified to do this, indeed am I scholarly enough in the subject area? I likely wasted an hour before I acknowledged to myself that while outside my comfort zone I should apply a process approach in the same way that I would second read a student paper on the MSc programme I teach – how different/more difficult could it be? I went in search of resources to assist this effort and was quickly rewarded. The obvious location was resources offered by the publishers so I digested the general guidelines from the perspective of an author wishing to understand what the peer review process entails. As a result, I now know the difference between a ‘single-anonymous (or blind) peer review’ and a ‘double-anonymous (or blind) peer review’. I was only ever familiar with the term ‘blind peer review’ so it was useful to know that in a single-anonymous peer review the reviewers know the identity of the author, in a double-anonymous peer review the identity is not known. But you knew that already, right?
If I needed any convincing, this resource from the publisher sold the benefits for me and I list them here in the interests of my continuing professional development in the area of research and writing –
- Keep up with the latest research
- Improve your own writing
- Boost your career
- Become part of a journal’s community
Moving on to the process, the publisher was kind enough to offer another checklist starting with a first read-through followed by a detailed review. Happy days, how could I go wrong? Well, there’s no right or wrong in this case, is there? It’s all a matter of scholarly opinion, isn’t it? By this time I had overcome my imposter syndrome and determined to take my own advice over the years “if in doubt follow the process“. So far, so good. Anyway, over two weekends I drafted, revised and finalised my review. The final decision was to recommend one of four options: Accept, minor revision, major revision, reject. Decision made, submitted and the next email from the editor contained the following message: “Thank you for reviewing the above manuscript…We greatly appreciate the voluntary contribution that each reviewer gives to the Journal. We hope that we may continue to seek your assistance with the refereeing process…“
Until next time, Sandra
Featured image courtesy of Pixabay
Sandra Flynn 