Peer reviewer
Definition
A peer reviewer is someone who evaluates a scholarly or academic work, such as a research paper, book, or grant proposal, to ensure that it meets certain standards of quality and accuracy.
Peer review is a critical part of the academic publishing process, and is typically used to ensure that new research is credible, accurate, and contributes meaningfully to the field.
Peer review helps to ensure the quality and integrity of academic research, and it can also help to identify potential areas for future research or collaboration. Being a peer reviewer is an important responsibility, as it helps to maintain the standards of academic publishing and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in a given field.
A more complete and fair method of recognizing the contribution of a reviewer to the final version of the article, would be to list them in the article, which would require open peer reviews. Journals and indexers can organize systems to provide public recognition to open reviewers, but more educational efforts are required to change the mind of those defending the old-fashioned blind and double-blind peer review processes 1) 2).
Peer Review process
Peer review crisis
Responsibilities
Toward authors, editors, and readers.
They have to provide some measure of “quality control” for published research using a fair and transparent critical assessment of the research 3).
They can detect bias, unsatisfactory study design, and ethical problems that may threaten the research, and provide feedback to the authors.
The critical assessment of the evidence and validity of the scientific publication enables the editor to accept, reject, or revise the manuscript, minimizing the authors’ complaints if the paper is rejected. Even in those cases, the appropriate revision gives the author the chance to reorganize the article to resubmit it to another journal 4).
Challenges
Challenges of the peer review process are:
1) the increasing need for reviewers due to an increasing number of peer-review requests, because promotions are obtained based on the number of publications or “publish or perish” syndrome and due to various online and hard copy publishers 5)
Most journal reviewers acquire the skills and knowledge to perform a manuscript review through their clinical expertise and their own experience in critically appraising the literature. If an individual performs an inadequate review, it is likely that his or her service will not be requested again. Sometimes an inadequate review is not the reviewer’s fault, but is due to insufficient formal training provided by the journals to establish standard methods to analyze the manuscript, or due to lack of information. Even if the reviewers analyze the manuscript as though they themselves were submitting it, sometimes there is a lack of a comprehensive set of guidelines for all aspects of the review process, leading to an unsupported decision 6).
To minimize this problem, the art of reviewing manuscripts should follow systematic scientific methods to enhance the quality and reduce the time spent on this practice. Systematic guidance minimizes the revision errors while the reviewers improve their practice 7).