7 Developing Peer-Review Norms, Guidelines, and Expectations for LIS or Your Discipline
Introduction
One of the most common bits of feedback (or complaints!) I hear from those serving as peer reviewers is the lack of clear guidelines and expectations for what it means to adequately provide a review. These rarely exist, and when they do, they are often out of date. In this module the norms and guidelines you create will be enormously helpful for you as a you move forward with any potential reviewing you do in the future. (You may even want to offer them as a working draft to a journal in your field!)
This module builds on the activities and the thoughts you surfaced in Module 6: Librarians and Peer Review. This penultimate module of this course focuses more heavily on activity and exercises than intaking new information, and everything you do in this module will be useful in the final module.
By the end of this module you should be able to:
- Define the role of peer review in LIS / your discipline
- Develop a rubric for referees to do peer review based on what peer review is supposed to do or be for
- Develop a policy document for peer-review workflows and decision making.
Activities and Exercises
Read: How to be a Good Peer Reviewer (7:1)
Read How to Be A Good Peer Reviewer by Jasmine Wallace.
Do: Define Peer Review for Your Discipline (7:2)
Using what you have learned in this course, define peer review for LIS or your discipline. Your definition should answer the following questions:
- What is the goal of peer review in LIS or in your discipline?
- Who is peer review in LIS or in your discipline for?
What you come up with might sound like a mission statement. Share your definition on social media using the course hashtag.
Do: Develop a Peer-Review Rubric (7:3)
Based on your definition and what you have learned about peer review, pick a journal in your field. Using what the journal says on their About page regarding their scope, mission, etc., develop a peer-review rubric. Your rubric should include questions that peer reviewers are meant to answer when they assess a submission and also outline what peer-reviewers should NOT consider in their assessment. For an example, see the Acceptance Criteria from Frontiers.
Do: Develop a Workflow and Acceptance and Rejection Criteria (7:4)
For the journal you selected above, revisit your peer-review flowchart from Activity 1:4, and review whether it needs any modifications. Make them as needed. Next, develop guidelines and policies for acceptance, revisions, and rejection. Consider the following questions:
- Who makes the ultimate decision?
- On what is the decision based?
- Are there any particular special considerations that should be a part of this process?
References
Wallance, J. (2019, September 17). How to be a good peer reviewer. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/09/17/how-to-be-a-good-peer-reviewer