Peer Reviewing for Journals and the Co-Construction of Knowledge
By Dr. Dermot Breslin, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Rennes School of Business, Fellow of the British Academy of Management and Fellow of the BAM Peer Review College. See an interview with Dr. Breslin: Theorizing Through Literature Reviews: The Miner-Prospector Continuum.
Peer review is the process through which scientific work is evaluated by our peers, and is the bedrock of quality in academic research. However, the process has been under strain in recent years. On the demand side, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of number of articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals. As many journals seek to provide 2 or 3 reviews per submission, this surge in numbers has led to a growing demand for reviewers. On the supply side, academics face increasing pressures on their time, with expectations from employers to increase student satisfaction, publish in elite journals, manage large demanding courses, attract significant research funding, and even make an impact on business and society. Writing high quality reviews is unpaid, and largely unrecognised by employers, and therefore comes low down on the list of daily priorities.
Faced with these challenges, finding a reviewer is a significant problem for many journals, with over half of invitations to act as reviewer declined (Breslin et al., 2021). As a consequent, the important work of peer review now falls on the shoulders of a minority of academics. To make matters worse, some leading voices have critiqued the peer review process as being biased, prolonged and unnecessarily critical (Cederström & Spicer, 2017; Tourish, 2020; Willmott, 2022). They argue that peer review results in the repression of innovative ideas, and instead favours the pursuit of dull and incremental contributions to knowledge.
Addressing these challenges, the BAM Peer Review College convened a PDW on the art of peer review for publications at the recent British Academy of Management (BAM) conference. Representing the BAM journals as a former editor, reviewer and author, I reflected on the different perspectives of reviewing for journals. I present peer review as more than mere ‘service’ to the community, but as a process which is constructive and even enlightening (Bartunek, 2020), as author, editor and reviewer work together in the co-construction of new knowledge. This important work therefore needs to be viewed, not as a necessary service to the community, but as knowledge co-construction itself.
Peer review is a social process involving the interactions of authors, reviewers and editors, each of whom make a different contribution to the production of knowledge (see figure 1). First the authors propose a new potential contribution to knowledge in a form of a conceptual narrative presented through their submitted paper. Second, the editor as the gatekeeper of the journal, needs to make an assessment of the quality of this contribution with respect to the journal’s aims and publication criteria. The editor also acts an intermediary in the dialogue between authors and reviewers (see figure 1), interpreting and evaluating the reviewers’ comments, and then providing guidance to authors. Finally, the reviewers make an evaluation of the quality of the paper’s contribution, through the lens of their own understanding of the topic at hand. As representatives of the wider community of scholars, they play a key role in developing the authors’ contribution for that larger audience.
Figure 1. Peer Review and the Co-Construction of Knowledge
When viewed from this multi-stakeholder perspective, good peer review means different things to different actors. From the author’s perspective, peer review works well when reviewer comments are constructive and insightful. Such feedback can motivate the author to develop the ideas and arguments in the paper, with a view to improving its potential contribution. Reviewer feedback can even provoke a change in the narrative presented, leading to a change in direction, a rethink in approach, shaping future paths of research.
From the editor’s perspective, reviewers provide feedback on a domain which may be outside their own specific areas of expertise. The editor searches for a range of views, including a mix of disciplines, experience and perspectives; seeking feedback on both the subject specialisms and potential contribution to wider research. The editor hopes reviewers will accept the invitation to review, and be committed to seeing the paper through the peer review process, which in business and management research may last several years. The editor then draws on these reviewer comments to different degrees when making a decision on the paper. This can involve balancing different, and even competing reviews.
From the reviewer’s perspective, it may appear that there is little to gain from the peer review process; as noted above, employers largely do not reward such service, and completing a high quality review takes time, in an environment of increasing workloads. However, such service can be extremely rewarding, as one contributes to the wider development of knowledge. Through reviewing one learns about an approach or subject outside one’s own specialism; which can even prompt a change in thinking. Reviewing the work of others also makes us more critical in our approach, as we learn to put a reviewer’s hat on. After all, reviewing is a very different skill and activity to reading a paper.
The many voices involved in the peer review process can make it challenging for authors, especially for those whose writing is more innovative or interdisciplinary in nature. Reviewers should therefore avoid some common pitfalls when reviewing. First, the reviewer should fully engage with the topic and arguments presented in the paper, and not those which the reviewer would have preferred to see instead. This involves removing the blinkers of one’s own specialism, to see the wider potential contribution of the paper beyond. Second, once the invitation to review has been accept, the reviewer should commit to the process over the long term, and not give up on the process in the second or third round of revisions. Finally, reviewers should avoid the extremes of capitulation (i.e. giving up on the peer review process) and heel digging (i.e. focusing on a narrow interpretation of the paper).
Good reviews are constructive, in-depth, consistent over the review process, reflect both subject specialist and wider perspective, and aligned with the publication criteria of the journal. Whilst the challenges of reviewing are many, good quality reviews can make the process of publication fulfilling for all involved.
References
Bartunek, J. M. (2020). Theory (what is it good for?). Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(2), 223-226.
Breslin, D., Callahan, J., & Iszatt-White, M. (2021). Future‐proofing IJMR as a leading management journal: Reach, relevance and reputation. International Journal of Management Reviews, 23(4), 431-442.
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2017). Going public. Organization, 24(5), 708-711.
Tourish, D. (2020). The triumph of nonsense in management studies. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(1), 99-109.
Willmott, H. (2022). Critical essay: Blinding faith–Paradoxes and pathologies of opacity in peer review. Human Relations, 75(9), 1741-1769.
More Methodspace Posts about Peer Reviews
Peer review is a social process involving the interactions of authors, reviewers and editors, each of whom make a different contribution to the production of knowledge. Learn more in this guest post from Dr. Dermot Breslin.