Roles of a peer reviewer
Interested in peer reviewing or offered to peer review and unsure what to do? Find out what the roles of a peer reviewer in SaintScience are
Roles of a peer reviewer
Imagine the walled city of Carcassonne as the sum of all accepted mainstream scientific publications; as a peer reviewer, you are its sentry at the drawbridge-operated main entrance. By controlling admission into its impenetrable perimeter, you stand between high-quality relevant and valid scientific publications and admitting harbingers of imperfect or worse, fraudulent science. Peer review is a community-driven, autocatalytic process where members with critical expertise in a particular field evaluate new submissions for their
- Relevance to the journal’s overarching themes;
- Logical rigour and technical accuracy; and
- Their originality and interest to a wider readership.
Where peer reviewers are not involved is proof-reading and editorial work for the simple reason that your role as a peer reviewer is in suggesting substantive rather than expressive changes to an article. Editorial work is completed only when any technical issues are addressed, which might have entailed major revisions to the original text anyway (please see the editorial house-style for editing queries). Substantive changes therefore require critical analysis of the research article; nothing stated in a given manuscript should be accepted at prima facie but questioned if unclear or uncited.
Peer review style
SaintScience uses a double–blind style with open review of reviewer’s reports. We do this to eliminate the possibility of unconscious bias (towards friends or peers) of reviewers towards authors and vice versa. As a committed open–access journal, we believe that peer review feedback should be available to anyone to provide advice in improving future article quality. Therefore, when an article is published, the summary reports (<150 words) made by reviewers respectively are made available with the article for download. SaintScience review follows three main principles:
- Anonymity – reviewers’ names are stored on our secure spreadsheet tracker alongside matriculation numbers. Only SMEs know the names of reviewers in their schools for the purposes of contacting and liaising with them.
- Open–access review – Once articles have been published, reviewers’ reports are made available for download alongside the article. This ensures that others can benefit from the suggestions made by reviewers. Reviewers will remain anonymous throughout however.
- Security – only relevant parties, namely, reviewers, SMEs, editor–in–chief and editors receive a copy of the article for review, eliminating the possibility of leaking