Peer review

:This article refers to the scholarly process of screening papers. For the Wikipedia process of improving articles, see .

Different styles of review

Peer review can be rigorous, in terms of the skill brought to bear, without being highly stringent. An agency may be flush with money to give away, for example, or a journal may have few impressive manuscripts to choose from, so there may be no use to being picky. Conversely, when either funds or publication space is limited, peer review may be used to select an extremely small number of proposals or manuscripts.

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Often the decision of what counts as "good enough" falls entirely to the editor or organizer of the review. In other cases, referees will each be asked to make the call, with only general guidance from the coordinator on what stringency to apply.

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Some journals such as Science, Nature have extremely stringent standards for publication, and will reject papers which are of good quality scientific work that they feel are not breakthroughs in the field. Others such as the Astrophysical Journal and Physical Review use peer review primarily to filter out obvious mistakes and incompetence. Different publication rates reflect these different criteria: Nature publishes about 5 percent of received papers, while Astrophysical Journal publishes about 70 percent. The different publication rates are also reflected in the size of the journals.

Related Topics:
Science - Nature - Astrophysical Journal - Physical Review

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Screening by peers may be more or less laissez-faire depending on the discipline. Physicists, for example, tend to think that decisions about the worthiness of an article are best left to the marketplace. Yet even within such a culture peer review serves to ensure high standards in what is published. Outright errors are detected and authors receive both edits and suggestions.

Related Topics:
Laissez-faire - Physicists

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To preserve the integrity of the peer-review process, submitting authors are not informed of who reviews their papers; sometimes, they might not even know the identity of the associate editor who is responsible for the paper. In many cases, alternatively called "blind" or "double-blind" review, the identity of the authors is concealed from the reviewers, lest the knowledge of authorship bias their review; in such cases, however, the associate editor responsible for the paper does know who the author is. Sometimes the scenario where the reviewers do know who the authors are is called "single-blind" to distinguish it from the "double-blind" process. In double-blind review, the authors are required to remove any reference that may point to them as the authors of the paper.

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While the anonymity of reviewers is almost universally preserved, double-blind review (where authors are also anonymous to reviewers) is not always employed. Critics of the double-blind process point out that, despite the extra editorial effort to ensure anonymity, the process often fails to do so, since certain approaches, methods, notations, etc., may point to a certain group of people in a research stream, and even to a particular person. Proponents of the single-blind process argue that if the reviewers of a paper are unknown to each other, the associate editor responsible for the paper can easily verify the objectivity of the reviews. Single-blind review is thus strongly dependent upon the goodwill of the participants.

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