Reviews: episode 1

We started by a really good tip from Alain Danet, regardless of whether you’re reviewing, responding to reviews or even just writing a paper: you can check The scientist’s guide to writing (get his book from the Sheffield library) by Stephen Heard. In general, have a look at Stephen Heard’s blog: it’s full of really good advice around academia! The TL;DR here is basically make sure you know what you’re writing about and then write it in the most concise manner (i.e. choose what you want to write).

How it works?

Once you submit your manuscript, and it raises some interest to one of the journal editors, they usually send it to an associate editor that will handle your manuscript. They will send it to reviewers (usually 2 or more) that will assess the quality of your work. The associate editor will then collate these people’s comments and send them to the editor with some recommendation (accept, reject, resubmit, etc) which in turns send everything back to you. Hopefully, if everyone in the process to their job in good faith it results in useful comments that will improve your manuscript and make it even more useful to the community!

How to do it?

The in good faith part above is crucial here. We’ve all heard and discuss parts where it goes horribly wrong, often because some of the humans involved were not nice or had some other interests in mind (I will not share the stories here for privacy reasons). But in general if you follow these simple rules, both when reviewing or when responding to reviewers, everything should run smoothly:

• Do it for the community: reviewing or responding to reviewers aims to make your manuscript better which will help the community. This can mean rewriting a lot to make the manuscript more understandable or doing some additional analyses to make it more robust. It can be annoying sometimes but keep in mind that it will eventually benefit everyone!

• Stay professional: don’t be snarky or aggressive/defensive. Focus on constructive and technical engagement. As a reviewer, always try to make suggestions rather than demands/requests and, if you need to, criticise the author’s work, not the authors themselves. As an author, genuinely consider the reviewers comments (they’re here to help you) and don’t be dismissive of their work (they spent time on your manuscript!).

• Be thorough and constructive: address each point raised in details. Don’t assume the other people know what you mean (either the authors or the reviewers) so always be clear when you make a suggestion or respond to one by providing examples of what you actually mean. (e.g. as a reviewer don’t say: “this is the wrong method”; say “I suggest using method X instead”; as an author, don’t say “we change the method”; say “following comment 1 of reviewer 1, we changed the method from X to Y (see lines Z).”).

• Acknowledge limitations: as a reviewer, it’s OK to not review everything or as an author it’s OK to not respond to everything. But be clear about it in the communication (reviews or response): when you’re reviewing, you can always state somewhere that you skipped a section (e.g. “I did not review the part in the discussion where the authors discuss birds since I know nearly nothing about birds.”). When you’re an author, you can always skip a suggestion if you provide a justification. On that last note, please provide an honest justification, don’t make excuses. For example, if a reviewer asks you to rerun analysis X on another dataset and you can’t do it because it will take you too much time, this is a perfectly valid justification (we all have limited resources). But don’t make up a false excuse (e.g. say “we didn’t rerun analyses X because it would take 2 years and my contract ends in six month”; don’t say “we didn’t rerun analyses X because we thought it wouldn’t change anything” - if it doesn’t change anything and that’s the reason, rerun X and show that it doesn’t change anything in the supplementary!).

Anonymity

There are many discussion on being anonymous or not. Often though these are not optional and imposed by the journal. Several years ago there was a tendency for reviewers to be anonymous and authors not. Now there is more a more a push for both reviewers and authors to be anonymous. In both cases there are pros and cons depending if you’re an author or a reviewer. If you’re a reviewer for example:

• Being anonymous can maybe help you feel like you can be more critical even if the authors are senior authors, or if they are people that you feel can take it badly and affect your career. However, this becomes mute when the authors are anonymous.

• Signing your reviews on the other hand can be used to avoid accountability (e.g. if you’re anonymous and in a bad mood, you can be more of a jerk than if your name was signed). I (Thomas) personally always sign my reviewers, it gives me accountability and I often had very good interactions with the authors (e.g. the authors thanking me later at a conference, emailing me directly for clarification/help or starting collaborating on similar work!).

If you’re an author, this usually mainly depends on the journal policy and you often don’t have a choice. More and more journals are actually imposing this model. This has some measured benefits, mainly decreasing bias towards authors from the Global North. However, on a personal note, I would argue that, although the actual identity of the authors should not be of any relevance, their career stage, and affiliation does come into account in my review. For example, if I review a paper that I believe is not up to the scientific standards in my field. If I know it was lead by an early career research from the Global South and a non english speaking country, I will put more efforts in my review in trying to be more didactic and clearer. I will also probably avoid making suggestion that involve using more resources (more runing time, more experiments, data collections, etc.). On the other hand, if I know it was lead by an established research in Oxford for example, I would spend much less time on the review and just suggest the authors spend more time on their research before resubmitting it.