Basics of peer review (1 hour)

↵ Back to module homepage

When you submit a paper to a journal, it generally gets checked by administrative staff (to make sure that it meets the basic rules—e.g., it's written in the proper format, it's within the word limit, etc.), and then may get quickly checked by the editor of the journal (to see if it fits within the journal's scope). Some papers get immediately rejected or sent back to the author at this stage, either because they don't meet the formatting requirements, or because the editor deems the paper has little chance of getting published. If papers don't get rejected at this stage, they advance to peer review. The following things happen during peer review:

  1. The editor will invite various people, who are experts in one or more of the areas covered in your paper, to read and review your paper. Lots of people are busy or have some other reason they can't review your paper. Therefore, the editor may spend a long time just to look for reviewers. At most journals, a paper will reviewed by 2-3 reviewers; however, the editor might contact, and get turned down by, 10-20 people before they find 2-3 who are able to review. These reviewers will generally be people who have published papers on the same or similar topics as your paper. However, since much research is interdisciplinary, a reviewer may have expertise in only some aspects of your paper. For example, if you use an advanced statistical method to examine a novel problem in second language learning, you might get one reviewer who is an expert in second language learning but not in statistics, and another reviewer who is an expert in statistics but not in second language learning.
  2. The reviewers will take time to read your paper and write a recommendation to the editor. The amount of time taken differs across journals and across fields—some journals give reviewers a deadline of 2 weeks to complete their review, some give 2 months, etc. Some reviewers are very punctual, and some reviewers always submit their reviews late.
  3. The editor will receive the reviews and make a decision on your paper. There are several possible outcomes: "Major revision" and "reject outright" are by far the most common outcomes the first time a given paper is submitted.
    Note that peer review is not a vote. Each reviewer does not just make a recommendation, but also makes comments about the paper. The editor will weigh the comments according to a subjective judgment of their seriousness. Thus it's possible, for example, to get two reviewers recommending "accept" and one reviewer recommending "reject" and the editor may still choose to reject, if the negative reviewer's comments were more well-justified and more serious than the positive reviewers' comments.
  4. Along with the decision, the editor will usually send the comments that the reviewers wrote. (There are a few journals that don't do this, and only give you a summary instead; but those journals are rare in linguistics and psychology.) Reviewers differ greatly in their style. Some of the differences you may see between reviewers include the following:

Continue to the activities below to investigate more information about peer review.

How long does peer review usually take?

This is hard to estimate. As described above, there are many sources of variation. It may take editors more or less time to find reviewers in the first place. Once they find reviewers, some journals have a very short timeline for the reviewers to submit their reviews, and some have a longer timeline. Some reviewers follow that timeline, whereas some always miss the deadline. Some editors are very proactive in chasing down late reviewers, and some are not. For that reason, it's very hard to predict how long any given review may take.

That being said, different fields have different standards. In some fields it is typical for review to take 2-3 months (there will, of course, be a lot of variation around that average), and in others it is typical for review to take a year.

Investigate how long peer review typically takes in your field. You can try searching websites like https://scirev.org or https://www.letpub.com, which compile average peer review times for many journals. Or you can ask around among professors, post-docs, or other students who have published some papers, and who may have a good idea how long things usually take.

How long can you expect a typical peer review to take in your discipline?

When you submit a paper, you are often asked to suggest some reviewers. To get an idea whom to invite to review your paper, journal editors will look at your suggestions, as well as your bibliography, and they may do their own literature search. They may not invite all of the people you suggest; indeed, most editors specifically aim to get some reviews from the people you suggested and some reviews from the people you did not suggest. For example, if there is someone who has published many papers in the same topics as yours and you did not suggest them, the editor may invite them anyway. If your paper strongly criticizes a particular previous paper, the editor might invite the author of that paper to be your reviewer, even if you did not suggest them.

Generally, if you suggest a reviewer who is a very big name in the field (like Chomsky or something), it is unlikely that your paper will be reviewed by them; those people are simply too busy, and get too many requests to review, so they don't have time to review every paper that is sent to them. It is possible your paper might get reviewed by one of their students or peers (if people don't have time to review, they often offer the editor some names of other people who could do it).

Think about your own current or proposed doctoral research. Imagine we are three or four years in the future and you have finished your study, written a paper about it, and are about to submit it to a journal. Who might you suggest to review your papers? List 3-5 names here.

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Responding to peer review".


by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-05-04. CC-BY-4.0.