The peer-review process is the backbone of modern science. For centuries it has served as the primary mechanism by which we collectively validate, challenge, and improve scholarly work before it reaches the broader community. For all its imperfections, it remains the closest thing we have to a quality filter for scientific knowledge, and that matters enormously.
As an author, I have been frustrated more times than I care to count by the quality of reviews I have received. We have all been there: reviewers who seem to have read a different paper to the one we submitted, who ask us to rewrite something in a direction that was never the point of the work, or who appear to be using the process as an opportunity to impose their own research agenda. Poor reviews are demoralising, time-consuming to address, and can cause genuinely good work to be delayed or rejected for entirely the wrong reasons.
Good reviews exist too, and they are transformative. A thoughtful, rigorous review can elevate a paper beyond what the authors imagined possible. That is what we should be striving for, and it is what prompted me to dedicate this first blog post to the subject.
Most discussions of peer review centre on the reviewer-author relationship: how to write a good review, or how authors should respond to criticism. What receives far less attention is the editor's perspective. Having served as Editor-in-Chief of a journal for more than 10 years, I have sat on both sides of the table, and I want to shed some light on what that experience looks like from the editorial seat.
There is a conversation that urgently needs to happen about how reviewers should be recognised, rewarded, and compensated for their work. Peer review is a substantial intellectual contribution that currently goes largely unacknowledged in the metrics that drive academic careers. That conversation is important, and I intend to return to it. I raise it here only to set it aside for now, because the moment we agree that reviews should be rewarded, we immediately face a thorny question: how do we decide which reviews deserve reward? Quality would have to matter, and measuring quality is its own considerable problem. Will we have to have reviewers for reviews written? But I digres, the main point here is that:
That reciprocity, however, is breaking down, and as an editor I see the consequences of it directly.
To obtain two quality reviews for a single submission, I routinely need to send between forty and fifty invitations. The overwhelming majority of my time as an editor is not spent reading papers, mediating scholarly disagreements, or shaping the direction of a field. It is spent composing and resending invitation e-mails, chasing non-responses, and working through lists of potential reviewers who decline, ignore, or, having accepted, never submit their review. I rarely send invitations to leaders in the field because their rate of "decline to review" is so high that it isn't worth the time anymore.
The practical consequence is obvious. How can I promise authors a first decision in two to three weeks when simply finding two reviewers can itself take that long? Slow turnaround times are not a sign of lazy editors or poorly managed journals. They reflect the fact that the pool of willing, available, qualified reviewers has become vanishingly thin relative to the volume of submissions.
And then there is the question of quality. Even when reviewers accept and submit, the reviews themselves are sometimes extraordinary in their inadequacy. I have received single-sentence reviews — not summaries, not conclusions, but the entire review — reading: "This is not a good work." No justification, no specific criticism, no guidance whatsoever. I have received reviews that are not merely unhelpful but actively discourteous. I have had reviewers withdraw mid-process on the grounds that the manuscript was formatted in Microsoft Word rather than PDF, as though the typography of a draft were more important than its scientific content. I have received flat refusals from potential reviewers who stated plainly that they expected to be paid. That sentiment has some merit, and I am sympathetic to it. But one is left to wonder whether those same colleagues submit their own papers knowing that the reviewers will receive nothing for their efforts.
Whilst the community works towards a more equitable model, and I genuinely hope that day comes, we must in the meantime operate according to the principle that has always underpinned peer review: treat others as you wish to be treated. The system is a commons. It can only function if people contribute to it in proportion to what they draw from it.
I will go further. I find myself increasingly sympathetic to the idea of a formal exchange model: for every paper you review, you earn the right to submit one. It is a blunt instrument, and it would require careful implementation. But as a principle it captures something true about how this system ought to work. The obligation is mutual, or it is nothing.
To the broader academic community, I make a direct appeal. When you receive an invitation to review a paper that clearly falls within your area of expertise, think carefully before declining. The friction of saying yes is real. So is the friction caused by your refusal, borne not by an abstract institution but by the authors waiting, and by the editor composing their forty-ninth invitation of the week.
The peer-review system is imperfect. The response to an imperfect system is to hold it to a higher standard, starting with ourselves.