What To Do When the Peer Reviewers Are Wrong

What To Do When the Peer Reviewers Are Wrong

Oct 01, 2024Rene Tetzner

What To Do When the Peer Reviewers Are Wrong | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published

Peer review is a valuable aspect of scholarly publication, and most peer reviewers genuinely want to help the authors and journals for whom they do prepublication reviews. However, peer review is not a foolproof system. There will probably be very few instances in which you, as an academic or scientific author, will not benefit from the comments offered by the peer reviewers who assess your writing when you submit it for publication, but not all of the feedback offered by reviewers will prove valid or helpful, and occasionally the peer reviews you receive may be completely inappropriate or simply wrong. It can be extremely challenging to determine what is helpful and what is not when you are reading feedback in order to revise your article for publication, and once that hurdle is surmounted the more difficult task of explaining to the editor why certain changes would be a mistake must be faced.

It is important to keep in mind that news of this kind will be received in the best possible light if you are able to accommodate some or most of the changes requested by the editor and peer reviewers. The aspects of your paper that you can change should therefore be mentioned first, and it can be useful to indicate briefly how you plan to resolve those problems. Once you have demonstrated your ability and willingness to make revisions to improve you paper, you can move on to any changes that you are not able to make. You should give valid and specific academic reasons for why these changes would be inappropriate or even detrimental to your research and writing, remembering that a lack of time or inclination to revise is not a sound reason if you wish to achieve publication. Let us say, for example, that one of your peer reviewers thought your methods ineffective for obtaining accurate data for your study. You know, however, that such thinking was considered valid twenty years ago, but the most cutting-edge research now conducted in your field uses methodology like your own. You will need to explain this carefully, being respectful of the peer reviewer’s opinion at all times, but also referring the editor to recent publications that support your view. You may have even included a paragraph explaining the relevant development of scholarship in your area – something the peer reviewer must have missed, though it may not be wise to point that out. What is wise is referring the editor to that paragraph or to the new paragraph you have added to explain the matter and address the reviewer’s criticism.

It is best not to assume that peer reviewers are deliberately being misleading in their feedback in order to squash your publication. Yes, it may be true that the intentions of some reviewers are not what they should be, and scholarly territory, theories and assumptions are fiercely defended by some academics and scientists, but it is best to avoid that mire if at all possible. Be aware instead that well-established ideas tend to change very slowly, and if your research and your analysis of it are truly innovative and groundbreaking, many scholars may not be quite ready to accept it. Some may not entirely understand your work and others may not want to understand it, especially if it somehow undermines their own research, though even so they may not be consciously aware of stacking the deck in their favour by decreasing your chances of an influential publication. An effective way to resolve this problem is with information. Explain the situation to the editor and refer him or her to research that has contributed to your own and to any part of your paper that will help clarify the misunderstanding and demonstrate the importance of your unconventional work. If these strategies do not succeed, cutting your losses and moving on to a different journal may be the best option, but do be sure to take advantage of any truly helpful comments provided by that first editor so that you can benefit from the rejection by improving both your paper and your future chances of publication.

Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.

Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.



更多文章