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how do you peer-review an article for an academic journal an absolutely critical skill to know for your life in academia well stick around for this step-by-step tutorial on this episode of navigating academia [Music] once of everybody my name is dr. J Phoenix Singh and I want to welcome you to this episode of navigating academia you're leaving source for guidance on how to be able to advance your career in academia as always I appreciate the love so please do take a second to like and share this video with your friends with your colleagues with your students subscribe to our channel hit that Bell to be able to make sure you get notifications every time we upload a new episode and comment below you can also follow us here at these social media accounts so today we're going to be discussing in a step-by-step fashion how it is that you can do a peer review for an article that you've been assigned by an academic journal now especially if you don't have a lot of experience with a peer review process this can be pretty daunting a lot of people even report to me that they experienced a little bit of what they call impostor syndrome insofar as this feeling of Who am I to be asked to review somebody else's work I'm either a junior or this is my first time or whatever it is it can be kind of a daunting task and ironically there's really nobody who usually teaches you the proper way to do a peer review sometimes you have an amazing mentor an amazing supervisor will take you aside and let you know but oftentimes we don't even know to ask whether or not this is the right way or not to do things or were a little bit afraid to ask because we think that we may feel or look silly now as I always tell you guys nobody's going to be a bigger advocate for your success in academia than you are but hopefully I can be a number two for you so that's the purpose behind today's episode now quickly to review what is peer review and where does it fit into academia remember that let's say that I've written up an article and I want to get it published in an academic journal hopefully a really good one with the high impact factor so what I'm going to do is I'm going to submit it formally to an editor of a journal the editor is gonna look at it and quickly give it a yes or no in so far as do I want this thing to proceed to peer review or not if they say yes it'll be assigned to associate editor who will handle it from that point onward and they're going to look at it and say okay who's on my editorial board who focuses on the same kinds of issues that are covered in this article now maybe there's nobody there on the editorial board who actually handles that or maybe there's only one person maybe two people but you want let's say three people or four people to be peer reviewers then something where they're going to end up sending it off to not only editorial board members but also so-called ad hoc reviewers who are people who are considered experts in the field sometimes they're people who the associate editor or one of the board members has had contact with in the past or a personal relationship maybe that's how they found you especially if you're not on the editorial board and if you don't have a lot of experience in doing a peer review this is probably you and being an ad hoc reviewer and we'll discuss in a separate video which I'll link in the description below is is really how you end up getting on an editorial board is by being an ad hoc reviewer so it's really important that you do a good job in the peer review process to be able to show the editors of the journal that you're the real deal and you do a really great job paying close attention and really helping to shine pieces up for inclusion in that journal makes you look good it makes them look good it makes the journal look good makes the author's feel really appreciated by your giving them constructive criticism it's good for everybody around now let's say that you're somebody who you didn't submit the journal article however you are somebody who's been asked to give a peer review so what you're gonna find out is they'll be usually an automated email which is going to be sent to you saying that you've been formally invited by such-and-such journal to be able to do a peer review and then usually it will either attach the article itself or it'll provide you with the abstract of the article now not every article is going to be a perfect fit for you and you should know that it's okay to decline to decline because you're too busy to decline because it's not a great fit for you and often times you'll be asked to recommend other people who it may be a good fit for and you can use that for a variety of reasons one them is maybe you know other junior faculty members other postdocs other graduate students who would be a good fit you know you can let them know that you're thinking about putting them forward for this proposing their name or email and they could be very flattered by that and tell you oh no that's okay but thank you for thinking of me or Wow great opportunity for me to be able to build my own network and connections and relationships and something to put on my CV yes please recommend me thank you so much either way it makes you feel good and makes you seem good and remember perception is reality in academia so it's it's a good way to be able to get some brownie points which is never a bad thing so let's get in right now to the five steps that you need to take after you've accepted the offer to be able to peer review an article okay so let's get right into it step number one very simple is download the article it will always be a PDF and then read the whole thing now when I say read let's say that you or I were just reading an article for either our own you know pleasure or because we're writing something ourselves we need to know the content usually we'd you know start with the cover page go through the abstract the intro the methods the results the discussion which is typical in scientific research but if you're in something like English Lit or art history etc you of course could have a different format but you go through the whole thing and then usually you're not you know reading all the references or the appendices or the table notes or any of these things but you need to do that when you are a peer reviewer I mean talk I'm talking about reading everything front to back even things that you wouldn't think about for example like disclaimers in the author note so you know who funded the study if anybody may be a author of one of the measures that are used is actually one of the authors of the study and they want to disclose that potential conflict of interest all of those things you need to read those things I know of me it may seem really boring to read the references but read the references and we'll get to why in a few minutes but it's very important that you read everything this is your function you are serving a gatekeeper mechanism for for all of knowledge you know I remember being an undergrad reading these textbooks thinking that everything in there was definitive it's not definitive all right everything that's in there comes from peer-reviewed research and so because of that you're the peer reviewer you're building the knowledgebase you know you're serving that function so take it really seriously that's step one step two is to open a new Microsoft Word document of your own and what you're going to do is you're going to write a little one paragraph which is going to essentially summarize the article that you just read it's going to serve a couple of functions one of them is essentially thanking the editor the associate or whoever for the opportunity to provide the peer review and the second is to be able to summarize what the article said and the reason that this is important is because you want to make it clear that you read the article that you understood what the big points were and that you're setting the stage with this paragraph for the remainder of your peer review so this could be something you know my old area was what's called violence risk assessment which is predicting the likelihood of future violence in different populations so let's say that I was a peer reviewer for one of my own articles which course would never happen but just imagine for the sake of this video my paragraph could be something like thank you for the opportunity to provide a peer review for this interesting article on violence risk assessment in individuals diagnosed with major depression period okay the article focuses on a sample of 493 patients in a forensic hospital in Saskatoon Canada and explores the predictive validity and reliability of the historical clinical risk management 20 which is like a checklist right when used in this population the study found that you know x y and z with implications for both clinicians as well as researchers period done you're not rewriting the abstract here but you're giving in a nutshell what the article was about done ok then right so that's the end of step two step three so then what you're going to do is you're gonna make a list of literally every section in that article all of the big sections so again scientific research it'll be the cover page the abstract with the key words the introduction the methods the results the discussion the references tables and figures and then the other stuff any appendices or supplements author notes or disclosures footnotes etc everything else those will be the different kind of headings that you're going to be dealing with so we're gonna call these section headings so make a list of all of them that's step number three directly beneath that paragraph you just prepared step number four is I want you to go through section by section and provide a bulleted list of all of your comments underneath each one of those sections right so read the section provide the comments try to be specific you can give general comments as well like for example it's a it's in the discussion you can say something like more details are needed with regards to the implications of the findings for clinical audiences done fine or the authors may wish to include additional limitations as currently only one is mentioned period fine that's okay but you can also say things like in paragraph two of the section the authors make note of such-and-such period it appears that they may wish to consider x y&z as well done or it could be something where there's a misspelling somewhere or the references are wrong or the parenthetical documentation is not done in compliance with the journals reference standards whatever it is be really really specific some people you know sometimes when you get the PDF they'll actually be line numbers on one side of the PDF so you can say on page 3 line 42 derrida but be as specific as possible where you can be and always be constructive don't be that one reviewer was just a bit of a dick you don't want to be that reviewer okay be really constructive if you can so that is number four this is actually doing the peer review itself finally number five is to submit your comments and your publication recommendation and you're going to do this usually through an electronic portal the same place usually where you downloaded the article itself and you're going to upload your comments sometimes as a word document or a PDF I suppose if you wanted to but usually it's something where they will actually provide you with little text box just copy paste everything from your MS Word document you know go through and make sure sometimes certain symbols like let's say that you're using like in scientific research like a like a alpha or a beta or something like this some of these symbols you know they don't actually go into certain kinds of web forms so they'll look like a little square usually or wing-dings these sorts of things so make sure you look and make sure about that because let's say the output doesn't go through you can just type the word alpha equals whatever so that that's kind of a core thing is to review your work in terms of your recommended decision there's almost always five different choices the first one is except without revision that virtually never happens if it does happen like something's wrong that it's just not a thing no article is perfect so really the best you get is the second option which is accept with minor revision if you're going to recommend that this better be the best article ever because there's always things that can be improved and except with minor revision is the holy grail of peer review so make sure that that's something where if you say it you really mean it the third is accept with major revision this is a real boon to the authors because it's saying accept it but we do need some big pieces to be changed this is maybe you need a new paragraph on something or a few additional analyses etc but it's nothing where you would tell them we're not going to accept it you need to go back and make a ton of changes and then we'll reconsider it right because if you say except with major revisions sometimes it'll come back to you for your final approval but not usually I would argue depends on the field that you're in the journals that are in that field etc oftentimes so we'll have to come back with the fourth option which is revise and resubmit this means the piece is not accepted it's going to give you a lot of there's a lot of comments a lot of things that need to be changed and then if they resubmit it then essentially you know either you're gonna be the peer reviewer again or sometimes there's even a tick box which is auto check that says yes I'm willing to review it if they resubmit it people do all the time though uncheck it and they say this one took me forever I don't want to look at it again sometimes that happens and if you're in that camp that's fair enough you know I don't find that you know you're gonna be docked for doing that by the journal by the journals team by the editorial team but again if you're really new at this leave it checked and just you know do the work especially if you want to get on that particular journals editorial board you really should do everything you can to be of help to that journal in the review process and finally the fifth choice is reject don't resubmit it it's a straight-up rejection it should not be published is what you're saying the gate is slammed shut is what you're saying in your gatekeeper function so that is the final thing that you do and then you officially submit it and congratulations you're done with your peer review well done all right y'all thank you so much for watching this episode I want to hear from you in the comments below what process do you use for conducting peer reviews of articles how often do you accept opportunities to be able to do peer reviews and what you're thinking on that and what journals are do you find yourself most often doing these reviews for what have your experiences been let's talk about it in the comments below if you have those tips and tricks' remember please do share them because in academia were one big community especially on this channel and we want to make sure that we're as much help to one another as we can be per usual keep it constructive and if you have suggestions or requests for future episodes of navigating academia things that you want us to cover please do let us know and we'd love to hear from you don't forget to like and share this video with your friends with your colleagues with your students since drive to our channel and follow us on social media if you're interested in one-on-one career mentoring sessions with me and how I can help you to be able to get these great skills and actually review your peer review so on and so forth so we can really improve you as an academic increase awareness of your personal brand as an academic and come up with new opportunities for generating revenue to be able to make sure that you're making as much money as you can as an academic then please do get in touch with me via the website below and let's have a complimentary one-on-one session and talk a little bit about your needs alright everybody I'm signing off but I want to thank you so much for your attention and I want to let you know as always that I want you to get out there take chances and be your best self thank you so much for stopping by everyone it's a pleasure to have you here as always if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to see more in this series on navigating academia please click on one of these links over here to be able to view more original content I hope to see you there [Music]