What is peer review? Peer review is the independent assessment of your research paper by experts in your field. The purpose of peer review is to evaluate the paper’s quality and suitability for publication. It’s a collaborative process where authors engage in a dialogue with peers in their field and receive constructive support to advance their work. Peer review is designed to assess the validity, quality, and often the originality of articles for publication. Its ultimate purpose is to maintain the integrity of science by filtering out invalid or poor quality articles.
Peer review plays a valuable and essential role in upholding the high standards of scholarly communications and maintaining a journal’s quality. It is also an important support for the researchers who author the papers.
SAj depends on the hard work of reviewers, who are the ones at the forefront of the peer review processs and are the ones who refine each article before publication. The feedback and comments of carefully selected reviewers are an essential guide to inform the Editor in Chief’s decision on a paper.
The peer review process can alert you to any errors in your work, or gaps in the literature you may have overlooked. What peer review does best is improve the quality of published papers by motivating authors to submit good quality work – and helping to improve that work through the peer review process.
Adèle Morvannou, one of two recipients of the 2023 SAj Best Peer Reviewer Award, says:
“Personally, I consider peer review as an opportunity to feel part of a community where its members collaborate to make scientific productions of high quality. But it is also a way for me to keep my mind sharp by cultivating a critical eye towards the literature, while having the opportunity to stay up to date with scientific knowledge and best practices. In recent years, I have given a lot of thought to how to provide feedback after reading an article in peer review.”
“It is not always easy as an author of an article to receive criticism from a reviewer. I personally think that the way to transmit these comments must be critical but argued, precise by giving examples and empathetic, while recognizing the contribution of each article. When doing the review I usually try to remember the good practices when as a clinician we give feedback to a trainee for example, this allows I think to have interesting ingredients for the authors to take into consideration the comments and be motivated to make beneficial changes for the article.”
To learn more about joining SAj as a peer reviewer, please email SAj@amersa.org.