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To celebrate the end of peer review week 2019 we are pleased to announce the launch of our ‘Peer Review Experts’ blog series. Each week we’ll be bringing you top tips on a wide range of peer review subjects straight from our in-house experts; Jeniffer Jeyakumar, Charlie Vickers and Yousuf Al-Mousawi, Senior Editorial Assistants at F1000Research.

To kick off, this week the team have combined their collective knowledge into this handy guide full of their advice for you to refer to when preparing to write your next review:

1. Before agreeing to review an article
   1. Do you feel able to review the paper? Read the abstract and check it matches your area of expertise.
   1. Do you have any potential competing interests, financial or non-financial? Raise these with the editorial team before accepting.

Below you can see examples of when reviewer Esteban Martinez declared a competing interest, which was then displayed against his peer review report:

• Peer review deadlines usually vary from one to three weeks. Is it achievable for you to carefully analyze the manuscript and write a constructive review in the timeframe suggested? Talk to the editorial team if not, they are often happy to offer extensions.

• Reviewing an article
  • Review as you wish to be reviewed, be critical but constructive. Your review should ultimately help the author improve the paper.

We’ve included a section of a review by Jessica K. Polka and Naomi C. Penfold, where they have struck the balance between being critical, whilst also providing points which are helpful and constructive to the authors:

• Structure your review and be clear which points are most important.

In the review extract below, the reviewers Lillian Skeiky and Devon A. Hansen have organised their ideas and structured the points they wanted to make with the use of sub-headings:

• Keep in mind the article type, this should inform the comments you give.

In this review, the reviewers Matthew H Todd, Edwin Tse, Marat Korsik and Mathamsanqa Bhebhe have clearly demonstrated that they kept the article type – an opinion article – in mind whilst writing their review.

• Focus on the science and the reproducibility of the paper.
  • Are any areas of the article, for example, the statistics or a certain methodology, beyond your expertise? If so, consider finding a co-reviewer.

• Co-reviewing
• If you’re an early career researcher, co-reviewing can be a great opportunity for you to gain peer review experience.

Below we’ve included an example of a co-reviewed paper on F1000Research: 

• As open peer review grows, it is becoming more common for co-reviewers to receive credit for their contributions – when co-reviewing, ask the publisher whether co-reviewers can be credited.

“I believe that claiming credit for a peer review is an essential part of the transparency and quality of articles being accepted into an academic journal. As an early career researcher, peer co-reviewing allows me to critically appraise articles while also collaborate ideas with another reviewer in the field. Co-reviewing allows for a more systematic way of evaluating articles and contributes to the experiential learning of researchers such as myself.” Robinson Truong, HBSc, MSc Candidate

We hope you find these top tips helpful the next time you need some guidance writing a review. We also have a PDF version of these tips, so you can download this handy guide to keep with you.

If you’re interested in learning more about F1000Research’s open peer review method,  check out our website for more information.