The Peer-review and Publication Process
How peer-review works and how you can set yourself up for success when submitting a paper.
Introduction
The peer-review process is a tool for ensuring that only repeatable, reputable research is added to the “literature”. This process has several strengths, but it isn’t perfect:
Strengths:
People unfamiliar with your work must determine if your manuscript is comprehensible.
People with a different perspective may help you make connections to other work in the field that you did not see.
People with different experience may help you see that similar work has already been done before in a different field.
People may keep you from overreaching, whether in how you interpret your results or how you believe your results impact the field.
People may simply find typos and errors.
Weaknesses:
Reviewers are only human. They may misunderstand your work or your motivation.
The review process takes time, which slows the publication of late-breaking work.
Reviewers may be biased as they evaluate your work.
Process
Peer-review is typically completed in the form of letters, handed back and forth via the journal editor. The peer-review process looks like this:
Read about journals and find one whose scope includes your manuscript.
Also consider the impact factor of the journal. Many journals are “low-impact” but will accept papers that present moderate advances in the field. Examples include Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB), Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (B&B), Frontiers, and Biological Cybernetics (BioCyb). However, some journals are “high-impact” and reject the vast majority of manuscripts they receive, unless the work is truly revolutionary. Examples include Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Also consider publication fees. Historically, it is free to publish a paper in a journal but doing so gives the publisher the rights to sell the manuscript how they see fit. Today, many journals are “open access”, in which they make the manuscript free to the public but require the authors to pay $3,000 or so to publish the manuscript. The system is very much in flux at the moment. I tend to publish in journals that are not open access, and then post the manuscript to my personal website or services such as ResearchGate.net or Academia.edu.
The editor(s) evaluate if the manuscript is relevant to the scope of the journal and if its rigor meets the journal’s standards.
The editor(s) email around and find 2-5 experts in the field to agree to peer-review your manuscript.
Reviewers read your manuscript and then send letters to the editor in which they summarize the work, identify overarching strengths and weaknesses, assess novelty, provide line-by-line critique of the manuscript, and provide an endorsement of publication.
The editor(s) read the reviewers’ letters and decide whether to reject the manuscript or to give the author the chance to edit the manuscript in response to the reviewers’ critiques.
The editor(s) send their decision and the review letters to the authors.
This part can be the most challenging for new students. It can be hard to read page after page of criticism of work that you spent months or years completing. However, it is important to remember that:
The critique is of your work, not of you, personally. You are valuable as a human, student, and researcher, even if your work is criticized.
It is not the end of the world if a manuscript is rejected or if you need to make substantial edits to a paper.
In fact, no paper ever receives the feedback “This paper is perfect, please publish immediately”. Even if reviewers like a manuscript, they find critiques. Reviewers have even written in their letters to me, “Please excuse my nit-picky critiques, I am only doing so because I like the paper and want it to be as good as possible!”
People in academia disagree with each other all the time. Everyone has their own opinion of how to best solve a problem, which model best captures reality, and which methods have the highest chance of success. Our goal as researchers is to do work that is thorough and comprehensible and intellectually sound, but that does not mean that nobody will ever disagree with us.
If your paper is not rejected, then you can edit the manuscript as suggested, write a letter in response to each of the reviewers, and send it back to the journal. The editor(s) will send the edited manuscript and letters back to the reviewers. Here is how to edit your manuscript:
For each reviewer, pick a color.
In each reviewer’s letter, respond point-by-point in that reviewer’s color. You should be very polite but concise in your responses. “Thanks to the reviewer for finding this error. We have corrected it as follows:...”. Then, paste in the changes you made to the manuscript that address the reviewer’s question or concern. You should also color-code the text in the manuscript itself to match. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say, “The authors addressed all my concerns, publish it”.
Sometimes you and a reviewer will disagree.
If they misunderstand something you said in the paper, or if they claim you never said something but in fact you did, your response may be “The authors politely point out to the reviewer that on page X, line Y, we state…”
If they say “It would be good to see [many months' worth of work] added to the manuscript to better support the hypothesis” or “The authors have done A and B, but they could also do C”, it is often acceptable not to do that work, as long as you address it in the discussion section. You can say “The authors appreciate this feedback, we have added the following text to the discussion to address this concern…”. If you have the time and know-how to do what the reviewers ask, do it! Some of the best results I’ve ever published came about because a reviewer said “I won’t believe it until I see X and Y”, so I did X and Y, and the paper was better because of it.
Only in very rare cases is it acceptable to respond to a reviewer, “I will not do that”, and then not change the manuscript in any way. There is almost always a better way to handle the disagreement.
This process may repeat two or three times. Eventually the editor will send you a letter stating that the reviewers have no more comments, and your manuscript is accepted for publication.
Copy editors will contact you and have you approve the formatting of your manuscript. For example, they will double check the spelling of names; they will ask you to fix errors in your works cited; they may ask you to enlarge features in figures. Their job is to make your work easier for the audience to read.
Depending on the journal’s schedule, your manuscript may not be “in print” for many months. However, at this point, your work is done.
Takeaway
The peer review process is necessary to ensure that the work you publish is of the highest quality. Unfortunately, this can be a drawn-out and emotionally difficult process. However, the peer-review process almost always makes manuscripts clearer, more thorough, and more complete than when first submitted. It is best to be patient and remember that peer review is not a critique of your personhood, just your work.
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