Can you believe this is the fifth year of Peer Review Week?!
There’s a great post about the history of PRW on the Scholarly Kitchen if you’re keen to learn more about how it started and what it’s grown into. Most years have had a theme, from transparency to diversity, and the topic chosen for 2019 is…
‘Quality in Peer Review’
So we’re asking:
What’s the best (or worst) review you’ve ever received? And why
We’d love to hear from you so please do take the opportunity to share your thoughts and experiences on Peer Review! Simply use the comment box at the bottom of this post to share your answers.
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I once submitted a paper to an international engineering journal, but the paper status was marked under review and with editor in the paper submitting system for over one year, so I wrote an Email to the Editor-in-chief, and the reply was there’s something wrong and delay with the reviewers, and then I resubmitted the paper to another international engineering journal, just two weeks later, the review results reached me and the review suggestions were detailed and constructive. In comparison with the two journals, it is essential to build an independent reviewer rankings evaluation system to ensure fair, fast, thorough and impartial assessment. Sometimes, an author is a good author instead of a good reviewer, in the reviewer rankings evaluation system, the rankings of different reviewers could be seen by the journals, and whether the authors could see the reviewer rankings or not depends on the journals. The rankings evaluation mainly focused on the number of reviewed papers finally published, important social and technical outputs such as the positive feedbacks from both the journals and the authors, and the reviewed papers corresponding awards such as Nobel Prize.
A team of us submitted a paper to a top, high impact journal, received positive reviews with some constructive critique from the reviewers and editors for resubmitting before final acceptance, so we scrambled to respond in a timely way, incorporating the suggestions as best we could while still keeping within the very tight word count. But when we resubmitted, we found out the editor we'd been working with had just retired, and a new editor took over who was skeptical about our premise. He lined up a new review panel, and two seemed to think it had potential but one of the reviewers hated the piece with a passion, his (I assume a male for some reason) comments dripping with sarcasm. So the editor rejected the paper. Such is the luck of the draw, sometimes. In theory we are revising for another journal but the other authors are off on new projects and we haven't made any progress. It still exists as a preprint and, sadly, that is probably as far as it will ever get: https://eartharxiv.org/feaq5/