Courses: Peer Review of Research Papers

Many students will be doing research. Many will be wanting to "strengthen" their profile by publications. A lot has been said and written about the art of research itself. I'll be focusing only on the "peer review process" and a few tips about it.

So this post is meant only for those who are already past their initial research results and in the process of submitting their research papers to good quality journals.

Almost every good journal follows a process in which your research paper is sent to a few anonymous reviewers from your respective field prior to accepting your paper for publication. They do a critical analysis of your work, give feedback, ask questions, clarify things and sometimes even reject your work.

There are two possible scenarios for "pre-review" (usually done by editors of the journals as an initial filter) after you submitted your paper to a top journal.

1. Desk rejection (The editor thinks that your work is either out of scope of their journal, or has poor language or simply not good enough work so he rejects your paper before even the review process began. It hurts your "intellectual ego" the most by the way :) )

2. Paper sent for review (Either directly or after slight modifications or after answering a few questions)

Once, your paper is sent to reviewers, again there are 4 possible outcomes after the review process is complete.

1. Accepted

Your paper was simply accepted without any questions asked or modifications suggested. (Quite rare)

2. Accepted with minor revisions

You've to answer a few questions, may be add a few figures or explain some points and your paper will be accepted after them. Only the editor will read your comments and if found satisfactory, your paper will be accepted

3. Accepted with major revisions

Same as above except that you'll need to answer a lot more questions. More detailed explanations and later on, your paper will again be sent to reviewers for another round of review. If satisfactory, your paper will be accepted or otherwise rejected

4. Outright rejection

You'll get feedback but won't get a chance to improve your work at least in that journal. But still based upon the feedback, you can address those concerns and significantly improve your work for re-submission. So, the feedback for "free" is quite valuable even in this case.

Out of all these scenarios, the most difficult one is number 3. And it is the most promising one as well. I'll be explaining it below based upon my experience (yours might vary). First, keep few suggestions in mind:

1. "Major" revision doesn't necessarily mean, your paper must be changed a "lot". More on that with an example later

2. Writing less with convincing arguments is far better than writing a lot while answering the reviewers' comments

3. Most important, if you can actually make the "Major revisions" look like "minor revisions" with your solid reasoning without explicitly saying so, chances are that your paper will straightaway be accepted by the editor without sending it back to the reviewers

4. Sometimes, you'll get frustratingly negative feedback. You might even find some of the criticism to be "stupid". But please don't ever be harsh in your response. Instead of calling it stupid, show it to be illogical with your reasoning and arguments

5. Unless, it is explicitly written to rewrite your manuscript, mostly the Major revisions can also be treated the same way as the minor ones

Now, the actual question. How to do all of that? Once again, there are a few tips which will help you not only for research papers but also in general communication.

1. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it fully

2. If you can explain it to your granny, you can explain it to everyone

3. If you can't explain it in one sentence to even a non technical person, you can't explain it in even 100 sentences

4. During my PhD, we used to have a competition: "Your research in 3 minutes". In this, we had to present the PhD work of several years in a presentation of 3 minutes to people from all fields

Now an example of "simple explanation". My PhD thesis was on "Fretting Wear" which is a highly technical concept. Here, I'll first give its technical definition:

"When two surfaces in contact slide against each other in an oscillating manner at very high frequency and extremely low amplitudes, the resulting wear is called as fretting wear".

Here is how, I'll explain it to non technical people: "Wear means the loss of material when two surfaces are rubbed against each other and if done at high speed, it becomes fretting wear".

In Urdu now to fulfill the "Granny" criterion:

اگر الہ دین کے چراغ کی طرح چیزوں کو رگڑا جائے تو وہ گھِس جاتی ہیں، میرا کام اسی "گھِسنے" پر ہے اگر وہ بہت تیزی سے ہو

Make it a habit to explain every thing you're working on in a similar manner. It will teach you, how to be precise and concise. (Ironically, I can't stay so precise & concise while explaining it :) )

Now, time to see all of the discussion above in action with a recent submission I made to a top journal in my field. Simply read the comments from editor and my answers below with few additional comments to help you understand.

Comments from the Editor and Responses from the Authors

1. Comment from Editor:

Please rationalize your wear test parameters. Did you have a certain application in mind? (Here, he basically challenged our whole testing setup. Very frightening initially but see how we answer it below with the relevant reference)

Responses from the Authors:

Control assemblies used in pressurized water-cooled nuclear reactor are made of tubes that pass through a guide. Both the tubes and the guides are made of AISI 304L stainless steel. Flow induced vibrations cause wear between tubes and guides. Wear test parameters were selected keeping in mind this phenomenon [1]. (The same has been added in the manuscript in the Introduction section highlighted in the blue).

2. Comment from Editor:

Why was the counter body a soft annealed C-steel with 82 HRB?