Publons, a website used by academics to track, verify and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions across the world’s academic journals, has announced a long-term partnership with Taylor & Francis. Under the arrangement, both parties will provide automated recognition to peer reviewers for up to 250 academic journals.
Reference link: http://www.stm-publishing.com/extending-publons-reviewer-recognition-service-to-250-taylor-francis-journals/
As the name suggests, pre-submission peer review refers to the review of your research paper before submitting it to a journal. Here, a peer other than the co-authors reviews the paper. This review enhances the quality of the research paper and reduces the load on the peer review system of journals. In other words, this process is a win-win solution for both the authors and the journals.
– This process improves your paper by filling in the gaps or fixing errors that might have been previously overlooked.
– It makes your paper more readable and hence, increases the readership of your paper and that of the journal.
– This process gives you the option to choose the person to review your paper, ensuring you get constructive comments from people who know the topic.
– It gives you important feedback from experts in your field of research. Thus, this not only improves your paper but also helps you to make significant contributions to the literature.
However, whether this pre-submission peer review should be implemented or not is still debatable. With increasing workloads and academic pressure, authors often do not feel like wasting time on pre-submission feedback. In addition, they are also reluctant to ask colleagues to do extra work, given that they are always pressed for time. Moreover, with the increasing number of co-authors on scientific papers, most authors do not seek additional external feedback.
But, by adopting pre-submission peer review as an integral part of the publication process, one can substantially reduce the burden on the journal peer review system. Moreover, this also reduces the risk of publishing flawed ideas or inaccurate analyses. peer review
When a manuscript is submitted to a journal, it undergoes a thorough quality check under the peer review process before being sent to the chief editor. Most articles face rejection during this process. There are several reasons for this.
1. The article is beyond the scope of the journal
Your article can be immediately rejected if it is not appropriate for the journal’s readership and does not meet the journal’s aims and scope. Besides, it is also likely to be rejected by the editorial board if it does not match the specified journal format. For example, if a review article is submitted to a journal that does not have the scope for publication of such articles, the editorial board is likely to reject the paper summarily.
2. The paper lacks key elements
The paper is unlikely to be approved if it is incomplete and lacks any important information, such as author’s affiliations, e-mail address, keywords, figures and tables, in-text citation of figures and tables, references, a proper structure, etc.
Lack of novelty and originality in the paper or suspicion of plagiarized information can also lead to an almost instantaneous rejection. Incomprehensible articles that show poor language skills of the author are also not acceptable.
3. The paper failed the technical screening process
If you have submitted your paper to more than one journal simultaneously, a particular journal might consider it unethical. Consequently, the paper is likely to fail the technical screening process. Even papers that do not meet the technical standards of the preferred journals are also rejected in the screening process. For example, a paper might be rejected for non-compliance with certain points in the submission checklist.
4. The paper is conceptually weak
While conceptualizing the paper, the author might fail to resolve certain fundamental problems that could result in unoriginal or impractical results. These problems include flaws in the study design, incomplete data analysis, use of an inappropriate method for statistical analysis or a poorly formulated research question. These basic defects might lead to rejection of the paper.
5. The paper is not well prepared for the journal
A paper is liable to be rejected if it is not formatted according to the journal guidelines. Disregarding such guidelines might result in excessive use of jargons, deviation from the focus of the journal, improper formatting of figures and tables, poor organization of contents, inadequate description of the methodology, poor writing standards, complex and convoluted sentences, and frequent grammatical errors. These factors will have a negative impact on the reviewers and will probably contribute to a rejection.
6. The journal is overloaded with submissions
Sometimes, a journal receives a flood of submissions within a short period. This restricts the available space to include papers in several forthcoming issues. Consequently, rejection is inevitable for many submissions, including some high-quality manuscripts. Conversely, a journal might receive several papers on the same or related topic. In such a situation, the journal will be forced to cherry pick and might return some well-conceptualized papers in the process.
7. Journals have their decision-making policy
Rejection of the paper also depends on a journal’s decision-making policy, which varies from journal to journal. Some journals forward the paper for a second screening if they are unsure about the quality of the manuscript. On the other hand, editors of certain journals aim to publish papers that are related to current research topics and their acceptance rate is directly proportional to the number of articles received in this genre.
As evident, there is a gamut of reasons for the rejection of a paper and the author needs to take cognizance of these facts for a better understanding of the rejection process. The author needs to keep in mind that the quality of a paper is not the sole reason for rejection; several other reasons can also contribute to the rejection of a submitted paper.
Many of us have often come across the terms “peer review”, “peer-reviewed journal” or “peer-reviewed paper” at some or the other point of time. But, how many of us know what exactly the term “peer review” refers to or what the “peer review process” is all about? Let us discuss this key aspect of the research process.
According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), peer review is the critical assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts who are not part of the editorial staff. Peer review, which is also known as refereeing, has become an inevitable part of the quality control process, which determines whether a paper is worth publishing/funding or not.
The origin of peer review often dates back to 18th century Britain. However, it became a key part of the research process only in the second half of the 20th century, triggered by the growth of scholarly research. As the reviewers are specialized in the same field as the author, they are considered to be the author’s peers; hence, it was coined as “peer review”.
The author submits the paper to the respective journal. The Journal Editor forwards that paper to experts (reviewers) in the relevant field. These reviewers thoroughly analyze the quality of the paper, validity of the data and methods used, and the accuracy of the results. They provide their judgment on the paper whether: there is scope for improvement, it is ok as it is, or it is not worth publishing. If there are changes to be made in the paper, the reviewers list in their comments the particular areas that have scope for improvement. Then the paper is returned to the Journal Editor who sends it to the author with the appropriate decision: accepted as it is; accepted with revisions; or rejected. Accordingly, the author makes the changes and resubmits to the same journal, or resubmits to another journal.
Peer review can be classified into three types based on the levels of transparency:
Single-blind review: In this case, the author’s identity is known to the reviewers, but not vice versa.
Double-blind review: In this case, the identities of the author and reviewers are hidden from each other.
Open peer review: Here, the author’s and reviewers’ identities are known to each other.
At present, the peer review process is implemented by a majority of scientific journals. It helps to prevent falsified work from being published. Its importance has become such that, most research are not considered to be serious stuff unless they have been validated by peer review. A peer-reviewed paper that is accepted for publication is looked upon as a work of quality. But, this process has its own disadvantages. It is an extremely time-consuming process. The long wait can be extremely frustrating for the researcher and can even jeopardize his academic progress. Moreover, sometimes the element of bias creeps into the peer review process. The reviewers’ judgment might be influenced by their own perception of things, the identity of the author, and at times, even the country of origin of the author.
