There have been so many ‘distractions’ in my “life, universe and everything” that I have completely neglected this blog. It has been a while since I have wanted to write something, but there was either no time or I simply thought I didn’t have a topic interesting enough to write about.
Well, the latter changed last week, when a friend of mine showed me a review of the book that the two of us co-edited with another colleague from the UK. That review is an example of how not to review other people’s work.
Obviously, we are all sensitive when it comes to our outputs and ideas. We invest an awful lot of time in research, often juggling it with a million other commitments. And so does everyone else. This is why we also need to understand how to look at and critically comment on others’ work both as anonymous peer reviewers or as people commenting on the quality of published work.
And here are a few tips (mostly) from my experience:
1. Get the point of peer-review!
Ever more people see peer-review as the opportunity to anonymously (or not) ‘trash’ those they dislike, or people whose ideas are not in line with their own. Feel free to correct me, but this is plain wrong. Abrasive and rude comments do not do anyone any good (apart from satisfying whichever need the reviewer had by writing them). A great example is the comment I once received, saying that “the flaws of this paper are too basic and too deep to qualify it as research and to try to rewrite. To correct its flaws a sabbatical at a good library is required“.
The point of peer review is a bit different – it is a way to offer constructive criticism to our colleagues and help them to improve their work.
- Set aside a bit of time and read the paper or the book carefully.
- If you see gaps or flaws in the argument, identify them and offer one or more concrete directions to the author on how to deal with those. In the case above – include a map to a good library 😉 🙂 😉
- Sometimes the author of the paper you are assessing will disagree with what you have written about on the same topic. That is fine, for as long as the argument is well-sustained. A diversity of opinions is conducive to an engaging academic dialogue and can only be beneficial to our ultimate goal of pursuing knowledge.
2. Look at the bright side
There is something good in each academic paper (an idea, a thought, an example, empirical data). The problem is often that authors, being immersed in a certain topic for months and/or years are unable to see it themselves. Hence they stash it under tons of other things until it becomes barely visible. The job of the reviewer is to identify those good things and help the author to build on them either in that paper or in his or her future work.
- Think whether there is an idea in the paper worth following up
- Offer suggestions to the author on how to make the best use of their research
- Think about the bigger picture: background and purpose of the project.
- I’ll give you an example from the book review I mentioned in the introduction. The author of the review said “the entire collection is a reprint of a [journal name] special volume. Indeed, in this respect, the lack of original material in the book is as puzzling as it is disappointing”. True, compared to the special issue, there is no original material in the book. That is because we applied for a SI2B (special issue-to-book). In such projects, the book is reprinted directly from the SI and no new materials are added.
3. Mind the disciplinary differences
With the increase in disciplinary interaction, we need to be very careful about the meaning of concepts across disciplines and try not to judge looking at others’ work only through our own lenses.
Again, to be more specific here – I work on the notion of ‘citizenship’, which cuts across disciplines ranging from political science, to legal studies, to geography, sociology, anthropology, etc. Each of these disciplines has its own understanding of this notion.
What has happened quite often is that journal editors (and even grant-awarding panels) distribute reviewing duties on grounds of keywords. Seeing a very short abstract, the reviewer accepts to assess the paper, only to realise that it is something completely different from what they had expected. And they sometimes fail to see disciplinary differences.
For example, when looking at the notion of ‘citizenship’, I focus on how legal provisions come into being. More often than not, I have been asked to look at citizenship as “activism and participation”. These are interesting topics, but they take a sociological/anthropological perspective that, truth be told, I am not really interested in. And for as long as one is clear as to what they are doing and what approach they are taking that should be fine.
- Hence try to look at others’ work respecting their disciplinary belonging and instead of (voluntarily or not) imposing your own disciplinary views; try and see how a concept analysed through another lens could contribute to your own discipline.
4. Take it impersonally
More often than not does it happen that we have at least a vague idea of who has written the piece that we are reviewing. And we are all human, so sometimes our idea of the person drives our review: we could admire the person or despise them and write the review accordingly. This could be a wee problematic because sometimes the people we like write things that could be improved; and people we dislike have brilliant arguments.
- Try and look at research as independently as you can. You are assessing someone’s output, not the person.
- Try and avoid comments in the review that target the person directly. Once I received a review saying “the author must be a Slavic speaker”. This is not ok, because the reviewer makes assumptions about the identity of the author and tries to fit them into a ‘pre-defined niche’. Perhaps a better way to phrase this would have been “the paper needs to be proofread by a native English speaker”. In this way, you focus on the paper, not the person.
Remember, through peer review we help each other grow professionally!
I hope this little blog will be of help when you review other people’s work!
Citizen J 