What is Peer Review?
Peer review is a critical component of the scientific method in scholarly communication.
- Scientist writes a paper and submits it to a journal.
- Journal editor sends the paper to other scientists for anonymous review of quality and originality:
- Was the work done properly?
- Does the discovery contribute something new?
- Is the subject matter appropriate for this journal?
- Is the paper written well enough for other scientists to understand it?
- Editor uses the reviewers’ comments and recommendations to accept the paper or to reject it. Most accepted papers require revisions to become a
scholarly article.