How to Be a Peer Reviewer Webinar Recap
By Jennifer Lovick and Bailey Baumann
Peer reviewers elevate the quality of the work they review with the feedback they provide. They challenge their peers to higher standards of research and scholarly communication. Most importantly, their feedback protects the integrity of the academic record. They are essential contributors to the academic publishing process.
The webinar on Tuesday, September 22, was introduced by Sam Perkins, a Peer Review Manager at SAGE and the webinar’s moderator. Then, we gave a presentation on being a peer reviewer, from building your reviewer profile and working with journal editors, to what to consider when conducting the review itself. Our presentation was followed by a Q&A session with our panelists:
M. Natasha Rajah, Associate Editor of Psychological Science, Professor, McGill University
Mary Beth Genter, Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Toxicology, Professor, University of Cincinnati
Stephen Kates, Editor-in-Chief of Geriatric Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation, Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine
Some key takeaways from our Q&A session are:
Good reviews are thorough, timely, constructive, and actionable.
Our panelists prefer bulleted lists of comments instead of annotated full articles. They also prefer the comments be separated into major and minor critiques.
Don’t take on too much. Feel free to identify any issues you happen to notice with plagiarism, image or data manipulation, language quality, or overall appropriateness for the journal in your comments to the editor, and let the editor be the one to investigate the issue further.
Let the editor know if you were invited to review an article in a subject area you do not feel qualified in, either because it falls outside of your field or because you have not finished your degree in that subject yet.
We had an engaged audience who asked great questions. We covered as many as we could in the webinar, but we were not able to answer them all. We will address key unanswered questions on the webinar page of the SAGE Journal Reviewer Gateway in the coming days.
We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who participated in the webinar. The turnout was strong, with more than 2,000 people registered. We look forward to working with you as reviewers.
For more resources on being a peer reviewer, please visit the SAGE Journal Reviewer Gateway and the Journals Solutions Portal. If you have a specific journal you would like to review for, visit the journal’s SAGE Journals page and look for the editor’s contact address or, in some cases, instructions for joining the journal’s volunteer reviewer pool.
About the Authors
