One of the exciting things that begins to happen during the postdoc, if you're lucky, is that you yourself will be asked to serve as a reviewer for some journals. This is great news because it means your name is, however tentatively, respected. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to demonstrate yourself a thoughtful scientist and referee to some editors. And finally, you learn a lot about the review process by being on the other side.
So it was with excitement that I opened up an email today asking me to review a manuscript. Here's the tricky thing, though: I've never read a single article in the journal that sent me this request. This is a not uncommon scenario for a junior person doing reviews--you're low on the food chain, and the journal that asks your opinion may be correspondingly low. On the other hand, it may be that this journal is respected but that it publishes very few papers from my subfield, which is why I've never read anything in it.
I asked a mentor how I should approach the review, given that I don't have any idea how to grade the "novelty and significance" of a manuscript if I don't know the reputation of the journal. His advice was interesting: "You should always apply the same standard of accuracy to all manuscripts you review, regardless of whether they are for Nature or Journal of I've Never Heard of It. Let the editor worry about whether the paper is novel or exciting enough. Your job is to make sure that the authors have done the proper controls to come to the conclusion they state in the abstract." So, after I have a chance to look over the table of contents for the past few issues of this journal, this is what I will do.
Well, that and looking up some however-irrelevant-and-useless impact factors.
13 years ago
14 comments:
I like your mentors advice. S/he sounds like a smart person.
Excellent advice. As an editor of a journal, I wish all reviewers were given such sound advice. My experience as an editor is also that postdocs and junior faculty generally provide the best reviews. They take the responsibility seriously and take the time to properly read and review the paper. I would choose them every time if I could.
Let the editor worry about whether the paper is novel or exciting enough.
While this advice may be fine for some journals, many journals explicitly request that reviewers weigh in on the "interest" or "broad impact" of the work. The higher on the food chain, the more likely that this will be asked.
And for those journals that do ask, if you were to do as your mentor suggests and say nothing about "interest" or "impact", it would be interpreted by the editor as a negative review, even if you wrote in detail about how excellent the experiments were performed.
I agree that holding the individual experiments to the same standards for all journals makes sense. However, how do you handle the fact that some journals require a more in-depth story than others if you don't treat reviews differently? I've had reviews come back where they didn't have any problems with my controls or current experiments but of course were curious about other things I hadn't addressed in the paper and wanted more experiments. Do you again just ask them for more experiments and hope that the editor gives some hint as to what the authors should really do? Or, does this happen after the authors submit the revisions?
Can you tell I'm new to this? :)
One person has already told me that this journal does request feedback on the excitingness of the manuscript, so I will have to deal with it somehow...
I agree that I expect a more "complete" story at higher journals, but I think it's fine to have a thinner paper as long as the conclusions aren't overstated.
Not all journals are the same, and you can't expect the same level of detail/completeness/novelty from J. Nev. Heard compared to J. Awesome. Nevertheless, every paper should have a "story" and the experiments must be properly controlled and not over-interpreted. Novel and exciting are relative words in the land of paper reviewing, so I think you will probably have to do some investigation into where the bar is for this particular journal.
Sounds like good advice to me. And, especially when it's for journals I don't know well and/or the manuscript covers areas I am not too familiar with, I try to find out why they choose me and focus on the aspect of the paper that is my own specialty. I always try to judge also judge the overall story of a manuscript, but in my review, I would explain in the remarks to the editor what I focused on and what not, and that while I am a specialist in A, I may not very well be able to judge aspects B & C. This allows the editor to judge my review better.
Often you can address the interest/impact of the paper without worrying about the status of the journal simply by considering who will find the results significant. Only the researchers? Specialists in the research area? A broad range of researchers?
I wonder what would you do if you are asked to write an invited paper to some unknown journal which may not be even indexed by Chemical Abstracts or Pubmed.
Reviewing a paper in a journal that you've never hear of is a very tough exercise. You mentor is right, it doesn't matter whether it is for a big journal or not; the person who wrote put attention and efforts in it and just for this reason it has to be treated equally, no matter the number of publications. Good luck !
Nice article, thanks for the information.
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