Peer Review 101: How to Provide Unbiased, Clear, and Constructive Feedback to Research Manuscripts
Peer review is a key step of the research cycle. As such, most researchers will at some point in their career have to take part in this process either as authors whose work is reviewed, or as reviewers themselves. Yet most researchers lack any formal training around how to provide and receive feedback in the context of research publication. Traditional peer review is slow and disadvantages researchers from historically excluded groups. Behind closed doors, a handful of unpaid reviewers selected opaquely and mainly through personal connections use subjective criteria to decide the fate of a research article. PREreview closes obvious gaps in the process to make research and how it’s evaluated more equitable. We train researchers in giving and receiving feedback, we engage communities of marginalized researchers, and we implement measures to reflect on personal bias.
This hands-on workshop was hosted in partnership with PREreview, and was designed to provide participants with practical guidance around how to peer review through a simple step-by-step process.
Participants will learn the basics of providing clear, constructive and actionable feedback, alongside strategies for identifying and mitigating personal and interpersonal bias when reviewing others’ work. Finally, participants will learn about opportunities to get involved in open, preprint peer review building their public profile as constructive, socially-conscious peer reviewers.
What you will learn:
- Learn strategies to provide constructive, clear, and actionable feedback
- Learn strategies to identify and mitigate bias in peer review
- Learn about preprints and how to contribute to journal-independent open preprint review
- Have the opportunity to share your knowledge and perspectives with your peers
The workshop was facilitated by a member of the PREreview team who trained facilitators, experts in preprints, peer review, and innovation in the space of open scholarly communication.
This workshop is relevant to early-career researchers (ECRs), researchers from historically marginalized communities, and researchers from institutions who want to transform their peer review practices for the better.
