Article peer review is an important part of our role as scientists, provided free of charge to scientific publishers, and a necessary (though not infallible) quality control on the published record.
Clearly, the vast majority of editors and pubishers appreciate the contributions of academics to this process. However, there’s increasing pressure coming from some journal editors to expedite peer review as quickly as possible – it’s unclear what impact this will have on review quailty, but it’s unlikely to be positive. The need to provide rapid reviews has come as publishers promise ever shrinking submission-to-decision times as one way to stand out in an overcrowded journal market.
Recently, I was invited to peer review an article and was given a perfectly reasonable two weeks to provide my comments. I accepted the editor’s invitation, but then nine days before the deadline I received an email saying my review was no longer required, as they’d already received sufficient comments. Fortunately, I hadn’t read the paper or started my report, and so initially wasn’t that bothered – it just gave me more time to deliver on my teaching commitments, get on with some overdue lab work, and finish two review articles of my own. But then various conversations with colleagues at LSHTM got me thinking. There are two reasons why I feel that this is a fundamentally poor way to behave (and why I won’t be accepting any invitations to review manuscripts for this journal in the future)…
1. I’d accepted the invitation and had set aside some time to read and comment on the scientific merits of the paper. It was only chance that I hadn’t started this process by the time I got the email telling me my comments were no longer required. I could just as easily have been a significant way through, meaning that my time would have been entirely wasted.
2. Delivering a peer review that is both fair and constructive for the authors, and supportive of the integrity of the scientific record, requires time and space in which to reflect on the data and interpretations presented. To rush this process does a disservice to the authors and has the potential to undermine the scientific literature; a remarkable amount of time and funding can be wasted by students and post-docs following up on results that are misrepresented in the literature or flat out wrong.
We rely on the scientific literature to a greater or lesser extent to identify the scientific questions we want to address and the hypotheses that we want to test. Therefore, it is imperative that we strive to maintain the quality of this exponentially growing resource, rather than seeking new ways to undermine it.
Irene Hames 18/04/2013 at 12:17 PM
I’m sorry you had this experience – it’s very bad practice, disrespectful of reviewers, and journals (and anyone else carrying out peer review) shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve copied some text from a book I’ve written on peer review that summarises why it’s bad practice:
“Inviting more people than needed is fine, but sending a manuscript to more than are needed in the expectation of using only the first two reviews returned is not good practice and should most definitely not be done. It is very discourteous, as the other reviewers may be investing a lot of time and effort in their reviews and, with good reason, be upset to find when they come to submit them they are no longer needed. Next time they are approached by the journal to review, they may on principle decline and good reviewers may be lost. Or they may accept an invitation to review but then decide that they won’t after all submit a review, or take a long time, in the knowledge that if they leave it long enough their review won’t be needed anyway. If only the first reviews received are used, there is also the danger that these might have been done very quickly and may consequently be superficial. If a journal bases its decisions on the first reviews returned from a larger pool of reviewers, what happens if any submitted after the decision has been finalized and sent to the authors bring to light flaws or present information that would have made the editor return a different decision or ask for different revisions if that information had been available earlier? It can get very messy and result in an inadequate review process.”
p55, Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405131594.html
Mike Taylor 18/04/2013 at 12:40 PM
Disgraceful behaviour. You should simply refuse to review for this journal in future (and explain the reason when you decline).
Sam Alsford 18/04/2013 at 2:04 PM
Thanks for your comments – I’ve not done much peer review (though my work’s been the subject of a fair amount!), so I don’t know how widespread this behaviour is amongst editors and journals – mentioning this experience to colleagues elicited surprise, with them all saying they’d not experienced this before (so may be not so widespread?). They also agreed that I shouldn’t accept any invitations from the offending journal in the future, explaining why, of course (as you rightly suggest, Mike).
Aidan M. Keith 18/04/2013 at 2:40 PM
I have also recently had the experience of receiving an email to say my review was no longer required. Unfortunately, this was on the deadline for the review and so I had already invested the time to read, makes notes, reread, make further notes and synthesise into the review, as I tend to do when reviewing. On the positive side, following my reply, the editor offered to pass on my review to the authors but the decision had already been made. This is the first time this happened to me but I do tend to get my reviews done in good time. I am interested to see how common this practice is?