What is peer review?
What is peer review?
Peer review is the core of what we do at PeerRef, so it makes sense to begin this series of blog posts with peer review.
Peer review is a crucial part of the academic publishing process. The peer review process helps ensure that research is reliable and accurate, and it helps authors to improve their work.
In the peer review process, two or more researchers in a relevant field read the manuscript and assess its rigour and validity. Where necessary, reviewers provide constructive feedback on how to improve the work. Traditional Journal-based peer review also includes the subjective evaluation of the manuscript's quality, originality, and significance. This assessment helps journal editors decide whether a manuscript is suitable for publication in their journal.
There are different types of peer review, including single-blind, double-blind, and open review. At PeerRef, we prefer open peer review. We will discuss the pros and cons of each type of peer review in another blog post.
Peer review has flaws, which is why we are trying to improve it. Many argue that traditional peer review is opaque, slow, prone to bias, does not reward referees and does not identify enough research error or misconduct. Several innovative platforms seek to address these issues. At PeerRef we are making peer review open and eliminating repeated peer review, PREreview provides training to reviewers, ReviewerCredits is helping reviewers get the recognition they deserve, and tools like Imagetwin and Papermill Alarm are helping to identify research integrity issues.
Peer review is an essential part of the academic publishing process, helping to make sure that research is rigorous and valid. The process has issues but new approaches to peer review and innovative tools are emerging that aim to make peer review more rapid, transparent, inclusive, and accurate.
Did you know?
Peer review was first introduced in 1752 by the Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that peer review entered the mainstream when journals such as Nature and The Lancet started to incorporate it into their publication processes.