This year for Peer Review Week we sat down with Dr. Sam Bose, the In-House Editor at Karger, to talk about how he experiences the challenges of this year’s theme.
The theme of peer review week this year is peer review volume, speed and quality. What are the main points that come to mind when you hear that?
I am constantly attempting to find a suitable balance between these three issues. My main priority has to be quality, and while I always aim to provide authors with a fast decision where possible, the quality of reviews needs to come first, and this can mean compromising on speed. Frequently I find that I need to invite an additional reviewer e.g. where not all of the reviews submitted are sufficiently detailed or if a reviewer doesn’t submit a review on time. While recruiting additional reviewers takes time, this is necessary to ensure sufficient rigour in the review process and ultimately provide authors with more meaningful feedback on their work.
With regard to volume, this is an increasing challenge due to higher submission numbers, placing strain on the amount of time I can dedicate to finding suitable reviewers, as well as contributing to saturation of our regular reviewers. I’m fortunate to have some active and trusted reviewers for my journals, but I try to avoid sending them too many invitations. As the number of submissions increases, I am often trying to find a balance between not overburdening our previous reviewers and dedicating time to recruit new reviewers with relevant expertise. Overall, this can lead to longer review times in the short term, but by growing the number of active reviewers for the journal this can also help to increase the speed and quality of the review process for future submissions.
When it comes to review quality, what key things do you wish reviewers would do more often?
The number one thing would be to provide a detailed, rigorous review that includes suggestions for how authors can improve their work. I frequently receive reviews that do not include sufficient detail, and a short review does not give me confidence that the reviewer as sufficiently assessed the manuscript. The role of reviewers is not simply to find faults in an article, but to help authors to improve their work. Even if an article does not have major faults, reviewers bring an outside perspective and are perfectly positioned to provide suggestions that can improve the authors’ research. I find it frustrating when a reviewer only provides a short statement saying the manuscript can either be accepted or rejected. Not only can this lead to delays when an additional reviewer is required, it’s also a missed opportunity to provide authors with more meaningful feedback.
Another frustration is when invited reviewers don’t respond to invitations. I completely understand that many reviewers are inundated by invitations to review manuscripts and that this can be frustrating, especially when invitations don’t match expertise. However, declining the invitation informs the editor quickly that they need to invite an alternative reviewer and not responding contributes further to delays. Ideally, declining reviewers could suggest an alternative reviewer, or if they do not have time to review the manuscript themselves, they may have a colleague who could act as a co-reviewer.
I have also had reviewers decline invitations in the past because they do not think that the manuscript is either interesting or good enough quality to be published, but I feel this misses the point of the invitation. Editors rely on feedback from reviewers, and I would always prefer that reviewer accepts the invitation and provides a critical review, rather than just declining the invitation because they don’t think the manuscript is good. If reviewers only accept invitations to manuscripts that they think are interesting, this can potentially lead to lower quality manuscripts receiving less rigorous reviews.
When it comes to review quality, what do you wish reviewers did less often?
A big challenge that is become increasingly common is the use of AI tools by reviewers. While AI is likely to become more commonplace and accepted, aside from breaching our current policies on the use of AI and potentially breaking peer review confidentiality, these reports are often overly long, superficial, and rarely provide high-quality feedback for authors. I’m increasingly seeing reviews that look as though they have been generated by AI, and I can’t trust that the reviewers have always provided their own, detailed assessment of the manuscript. A completely AI generated review doesn’t provide value to authors from the peer review process. After all, there’s nothing to prevent authors themselves asking these tools to provide a ‘review’ of their manuscript before submission if they choose to. The reason I invite reviewers is so that they can provide their own expertise and perspective to assess a manuscript. In my view, purely AI generated reviews, even if they can help highlight potential issues in manuscripts, defeat the purpose of peer review.
Another major frustration is reviewers who accept an invitation and then become unresponsive, and I find that this is one of the main causes of delays. If a reviewer accepts an invitation and then doesn’t submit a review on time or becomes unresponsive, this can set the whole process back again by weeks.
Another common issue is reviewers providing recommendations of their own citations. On some occasions, providing relevant citations that the authors may have missed can be helpful, but if I see that a reviewer is recommending citation of their own work this also leads to further delays when the reviewer then needs to be replaced.
If you had a magic wand, what one thing about peer review would you change?
I believe that authors should receive value from the peer review process, so the one thing that I would love to see is that every reviewer report submitted includes some form of constructive feedback that the authors can use to improve their work, regardless of the final decision on the manuscript. I completely understand that speed is often the priority for authors, but if you have confidence that the peer review process is going to result in meaningful feedback that could help to improve your research, the process would more frequently be perceived as constructive rather than just a potential barrier to publication.
