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How to review an article - Overview

Despite the importance of peer review, the process of peer reviewing is rarely taught in universities. Compared with conducting research, teaching, and writing your own manuscripts, reviewing someone else’s work may seem relatively easy. In fact, reviewing is a special skill that takes time and effort to develop.

When peer reviewing, it is helpful to think from the point of view of three different groups of people:

  1. Authors. Try to review the manuscript as you would like others to review your work. When you point out problems in a manuscript, do so in a way that will help the authors to improve the manuscript. Assume that the authors are doing their best to produce an excellent manuscript but need objective outsiders to help identify problems in their methods, analysis, and presentation. Even if you recommend to the editor that the manuscript be rejected, your suggested revisions could help the authors prepare the manuscript for submission to a different journal.
  2. Journal editors. Comment on the importance and novelty of the study. Editors want to publish high-quality papers that will be cited. In choosing such papers, editors need expert help to determine if a manuscript’s research and analysis are sound, and if it makes an important contribution to the field. Peer reviewers help editors by improving the quality of manuscripts before they are published in the editor’s journal.
  3. Readers. Identify areas that need clarification to make sure other readers can easily understand the manuscript. As a reviewer, you can also save readers’ time and frustration by helping to keep unimportant or error filled research out of the published literature.

Writing a thorough, thoughtful review usually takes several hours or more. But by taking the time to be a good reviewer, you will be providing a service to the scientific community.

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Original URL: http://www.springer.com/authors/journal+authors/peer-review-academy?SGWID=0-1741413-12-959504-0

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Picture Remarks:

Sebastian's remark: removed bulletpoints in front of the numbers!

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