Early career researchers (ECRs) are typically unsure how to deal with peer review. Our resources and training can help.

Part of a series on navigating peer review, this article explains different aspects of making your initial submission.

How long should you sit and wait after submission before checking with an editor about peer review? This article addresses this issue.

This article explains major revisions following peer review and how you can navigate them.

This article explains how to respond to minor comments received from a journal after peer review.

This article explains how to respond to peer review comments you disagree with in order to maximise your chances of acceptance.

It is important to acknowledge the people involved in compiling and writing your research. Many journals now require authors to acknowledge not only the authors who were involved in writing up the research, but also any individuals who contributed to the research in some way. These are know as authorship and contributorship. 

Papers sent out to journals and (in particular) grant applications are more likely to be rejected than accepted (or funded). That said, it helps to understand rejection and also look for a silver linking. This article explains both these points.

Write to an editor if you feel too much time has passed between submission and the return of reviews.

Typically, academic authors tend to submit their articles to journals via online automated systems and then sit back and wait.

This article discusses how to communicate with editors in the course of the peer review process.

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 This means that the article will no longer proceed through the peer review process, will not be published, and becomes the authors’ “property” once again, to revise and/or resubmit elsewhere if desired.

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.

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.

As you already know, the quality of the manuscript is a decisive criterion for its screening in / out at the pre-peer review—preliminary editorial review, that is—stage. During an initial review, the journal editors generally aim at identifying whether the manuscript:

1. sufficiently satisfies editorial guidelines of that journal;
2. is likely to provide clear scientific contribution and implications for the domain in question; and 
3. has some likelihood to be favourably evaluated by the journal’s peer reviewers.

A manuscript may be rejected by the journal editors for a variety of reasons, including subject matter interest, and sometimes even simply pipeline management—namely, too many articles on the same topic. This article discusses ways to handle and even benefit from manuscript rejection.

This module is designed to help you understand the peer review process. It talks about peer review, explains the peer review process, describes the types of peer review and shares tips on how to become a great peer reviewer.

Tune in to our bitesize webinar to learn more.

Module 13 will help you navigate the revision and resubmission process. It helps you understand the process, it gives tips for revising, resubmitting and going through the revision response.

Tune in to our bitesize webinar to learn more.

There are several steps you can take as an academic to pave the way for a successful publishing career. One of them is to serve as a peer reviewer for a journal and experience the review process. 

A peer review of your paper will generally indicate that you need to make either minor or major revisions. This article discusses essential steps to help take your article from the revisions stage toward acceptance.