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What are the Differences between Single-Blind and Double-Blind Peer Review?

• In single-blind peer review, only the reviewers are anonymous. Reviewers know the authors’ names and backgrounds, but authors don’t know those of the reviewers.
• In double-blind peer review, both the authors and reviewers keep their anonymity. Only the editor knows the identity of all parties involved.

What is Peer Review?

Peer review is the process where an academic author’s work is subjected to the examination of other experts in the same field as part of the journal publication process.‘ 

London, September 2020: Portland Press Limited has partnered with Charlesworth Author Services to provide Portland Press’ global biosciences author community with English language editing and publication support services through English and Chinese local-language web portals. Portland Press is the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society and publishes both journals and books in cellular and molecular life sciences.  Charlesworth currently provide Portland Press with sales representation in China.

Withdrawing an academic article means asking a journal to stop considering the article for publication at any point prior to its actual publication. This means that the article will no longer proceed through the peer review process, will not be published, and becomes the authors’ “property” once again, to revise and/or resubmit elsewhere if desired.

Retraction is removing an article from the scientific record at any point after its publication. Retraction is distinct from withdrawal, which occurs prior to publication. Also, in contrast to withdrawal, retractions are visible to the scientific community, as the original papers are typically preserved as part of the publication record.

When beginning a research project, one of the first steps you are likely to carry out is performing a literature search to obtain an overview of the current state of the field. Performing a literature search can help you understand what is currently known about a specific topic and what question or questions remain unanswered.

Using punctuation in English-language academic writing is important to help ensure that your intended meaning is conveyed as clearly as possible. In addition, using punctuation correctly gives readers (including journal editors) a good impression of the quality of the paper, which can affect the perception of the quality of a study. In this post, we will talk about some of the common mistakes and misunderstandings around punctuation in English paper writing and how to avoid them.

Before submitting your manuscript to an academic journal, it is important to format it according to the journal’s guidelines, which can cover anything from the font style used to the sections that should be included in the paper. Formatting a manuscript can be a detailed, time-consuming process, but there a several advantages to submitting a properly formatted manuscript.

Reference management tools are software programs that can help organise and cite references for academic writing. They serve as “virtual libraries” in which you can store hundreds of references to published papers that contain all of the relevant publication information, such as author names, journal names, volume, issue, page numbers, and more. 

A presubmission inquiry is a quick and easy way to gauge the likelihood of your paper being sent out for review if you choose to make a formal submission to an academic journal. 

Getting a response from a journal you have submitted your paper to can be a tense moment: the decision to accept, reject, or revise is a major step in the publication process. Much of the feedback received at this step will be about the scientific content of your paper.

Getting your paper published can be a long and arduous process. You may not be able to control what the editors think or what the reviewers say; however, you can make sure that your paper is in great shape in order to help accelerate the publication process as much as possible.

Peer review acts as a quality check on academic literature, defined as ‘a formal system whereby a piece of academic work is scrutinised by people who were not involved in its creation but are considered knowledgeable about the subject.’^[1] The peer review process ensures that all manuscripts submitted to journals meet certain standards, with most journals following similar steps.^[2]

As so many academics can tell you, nothing is more frustrating than working for months on a paper and then receiving an almost immediate rejection from your target journal. Data has been collated by major publishing companies that reveals some of the main reasons academic research papers get rejected by handling editors without peer review.

The introduction to an academic article is the first section of the paper, immediately following the abstract. One of the most important functions of an introduction is to answer the question ‘why?’: why was the study performed, and why is it interesting and/or important? 

The main purpose of the title of your academic research article is to quickly and clearly convey the most important overall conclusion from your study; essentially, it is a one-sentence summary of the entire study. 

The purpose of a literature search is to obtain an overview of the current state of the field; that is, what is currently known about a specific topic and what questions remain unanswered. There are a variety of reasons why you may wish to perform a literature search over the course of your research career.

Research produces data, and as researchers, we develop the skills to interpret it and draw out the details, the trends, and the correlations, that are of interest.  For a wider audience, we need to present the data in a way that makes these important points as clear as possible.  Publishing in a journal, readers don’t want to have to wade through all the data to see whether the arguments stand up.  When writing for a general audience, it’s even more important to present data in an easily digested manner.

If you’re running interviews or focus groups as part of your research, you’re going to end up with plenty of audio, or perhaps video, which needs transcribing.  If you’ve ever tried transcription, you’ve probably found it can take a surprisingly long time, and there are inevitably bit of audio which you find yourself puzzling over – what exactly was that word?  Who was speaking then?

At some point, we all take notes for our research.  It might be jotting down the results of experiments, pulling out the key points from a text, or setting out the key points made by a speaker at a conference.  You might already have excellent note-taking skills, but it’s easy to miss something important, or end up with notes that make little sense when you return to them months or even years later.