Early Career Reviewers
With support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT), we developed a guide and a workshop for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) with practical advice on what to consider when being asked to peer review for a scientific journal; from deciding on whether or not to accepting a peer review invitation to what to consider after submitting the report.
A peer review guide
Our guide summarises key points of good peer review with reference to open (educational) resources, publications, blog posts, checklists and tools for further reference. To help ECRs critically evaluate the validity of the presented statistics, we put special emphasis on the review of the statistical design and methods. Ensuring that only methodologically sound research is published is essential. However, there are many cases where statistical errors are overlooked. Possible reasons include a lack of statistical knowledge, the lack of clarity on what peer review should cover, or common misconceptions on statistical concepts. Our guide is meant to support non-statistician ECRs in promoting good research practices via peer review.
With this guide we specifically, but not exclusively, target non-statistician ECRs in empirical and quantitative research fields, such as psychology, economy, biology, or political science. The targeted ECRs are situated in a career stage between early doctorate and early post-doctorate, with only limited experience in peer review.
Our guide is available as
An early career reviewer workshop
The guide was then used in a workshop for (non-statistician) ECRs, interested in conducting peer review of journal articles. This workshop was organised at UniDistance Brig on January 30, 2025. Seventeen ECRs (PhD students and postdoctoral fellows) joined. After an interactive lecture and discussion on good peer review, we formed three groups to review three real submitted manuscripts together. At the end of the day (and after the workshop), we drafter peer review reports with recommendations to revise which were submitted to the journal. We want to thank the editors who agreed that we could use the manuscripts in our workshop. Note that we transparently communicated the names of all the ECRs involved in the specific reviews. We also want to express our gratitude to the 17 ECRs who joined our workshop, participated extremely actively, and gave us valuable feedback.
The workshop description to be used and adapted by others to conduct a similar workshop at their institution is available here: https://osf.io/wp548.
Contact
This project was led by Rachel Heyard and Corinna Martarelli.
