Peer reviewers are the backbone of your publication process. While stages like editing and layout are crucial, they cannot happen without a proper peer review step. Making sure that the peer review stage runs smoothly ensures that all other stages can flow properly.
In short, selecting good peer reviewers is one of the most important things you can do to make sure that the publishing process functions as it should.
But why is it so important to find good peer reviewers and why do they have so much impact on the process?
Why good peer reviewers are important
Finding and inviting the correct peer reviewers for a manuscript is critical. Sending invitations to the wrong potential peer reviewers can actually have many negative impacts. But here, we’ll talk about the two most important ones:
- The wrong choice wastes time time
- Negative impacts on reputation
The wrong choice wastes time
At a glance, molecular biology and molecular chemistry might seem similar. They both deal with “molecules”, right? But these are two different fields with different areas of expertise. They deal in different subject matter, and it’s irresponsible to just assume “it’s all the same thing”.
Suppose you invite two candidates for peer review, and neither are subject matter experts. These two candidates are really busy with work and do not have a chance to respond to you until three or four days after you send the invitation. They respond in the negative—they cannot help you. You follow up and ask them if they can recommend someone.
They tell you that they don’t know anyone because it’s not their area of expertise. This has gotten you no closer to a peer review, and has cost you about a week of time.
Finding good peer review candidates is critical to make sure you don’t waste time.
The right peer reviewer can still cost you time
Being honest, selecting a good candidate can still take time. There can be scheduling issues or even an inability to help when you make the right choice. This is why it is critical to make sure that you’re not adding delays by looking at the wrong candidates.
One way to avoid wasting time is to provide potential peer reviewers with a peer review report guide.
Negative impacts on reputation
The reality is that academics can be very busy. No one likes having their time wasted, and when it comes to reviewing manuscripts, many academics actually like imparting their expertise.
People like knowing that their thoughts and experience matter.
But people don’t like knowing that they’re being contacted by someone that didn’t bother to look into their area of expertise.
Academics and researchers will usually be less inclined to help you if they’re constantly being incorrectly contacted for review. They might not read future requests, or even worse, they may simply refuse to offer to help you in the future.
Make sure that you respect researchers and academics, and they’ll return the favour.
How can you find good peer reviewers?
The truth is that there usually aren’t many options for “easy ways to find peer reviewers”. That said, finding good ones isn’t as challenging as you might think.
References sections
When a manuscript is submitted to your journal, it should have a reference section as well. That reference section contains all the works cited in the research and can offer an valuable list of potential peer review candidates.
Looking up the cited works will also usually give you contact information for some of the authors, and can also give you details of what institution that author belongs to.
Remember though, authors might have moved from one job to another, so this isn’t a guaranteed option.
Recommendations from the authors
This is also a good option, and one you might want to keep in mind. Asking authors to recommend potential reviewers can be a great way to get ahead of the curve and have a good head start to find candidates. This does come with a very important caveat: you have to check for potential conflicts of interest.
When you’re looking at recommended reviewers, you need to make sure that these candidates don’t have prior history with the authors. Check their history to ensure that they didn’t work together or write papers together previously. Make sure that these candidates are truly unbiased.
Databases
Some systems, like journal management systems, have databases that you can create over time. These database are often organized by keywords, so finding a list of potential peer reviewers is as easy as writing “mRNA” or “patent law”.
These databases can often provide you with many candidates because the lists are curated over long periods of time (years or even decades), and they make the entire process of finding good peer reviewers easy.