Learning the art of Scholarly Peer-Review: Insights from the Communication Discipline

Abstract

Many scholars find the peer-review process to be a puzzling, non-transparent, and subjective exercise. Many emerging scholars also learn about the peer-review and publishing process through painful and time-consuming trial and error while still students or as early-career researchers rather than through formal training or guided supervision. Yet many pitfalls exist in this process for new and veteran scholars alike. With this study, grounded in the communication field, we aim to pull back the curtain on this opaque process and assist scholars in their publishing ambitions while also providing suggestions, primarily for journal editors and those who train future reviewers, about how the peer-review process can be improved for collective benefit. To do so, this grounded theory study reviews a year's worth of reviews from a communication journal to explore which issues reviewers identify within the submitted research, to explore how the reviewer feedback reveals their implicit understanding of their role in the peer-review process, and to identify how clear reviewers and editors are regarding which feedback is most important. Taken together, this allows for an understanding of how reviewers and editors engage in the social construction of research. The results inform the training of communication scholars, reviewers, and editors.