Peer Reviewing: Guidelines to help New Academics

Therefore, learning to be a better reviewer benefits every educator who assesses the quality of written student work. Furthermore, reviewing the work of others also helps to prepare better class assessments, as it introduces the reviewer to how others think and thus improves detection of potential miscommunication.

Below, we have collected a few resources that can help you to become a better reviewer:

Academic writing for dummies: Xander Lub provides his review commentary on an article:

Free Elsevier Certified Peer Reviewer –course (requires registration).

Good practice in academic peer review: A short guide for reviewers and authors by Peter Lugosi:

Other great articles on how to conduct article review include the ones listed below. Unfortunately, we cannot provide them here for copyright reasons:

Leblebici, H. (1996). The act of reviewing and being a reviewer. In P. J. Frost & M. S. Taylor (Eds.), Rhythms of academic life: Personal accounts of careers in academia (pp. 263-267). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Romanelli, E. (1996). Becoming a reviewer: Lessons somewhat painfully learned. In P. J. Frost & M. S. Taylor (Eds.), Rhythms of academic life: Personal accounts of careers in academia (pp. 263-267). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Schwab, D.P. (1995). Reviewing empirically based manuscripts: Perspectives on process. In L.L. Cummings & P.J. Frost (Eds.), Publishing in Organizational Sciences (171-181). Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin.

The best way to learn to assess argumentation is to review. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to volunteer as a reviewer for EuroCHRIE conferences. The academic program of the conferences relies on the reviewers, and the 3000-word paper format offers the opportunity to practice this skill without having to engage with full-length articles, arguably a time-consuming exercise. Please contact Rai Shacklock (admin@eurochrie.org) to get added to the list of conference reviewers and provide valuable contribution to your fellow conference participants!