Who Is Suggested Potential Reviewer for Journal Article

Nearly every time yous submit a scientific manuscript, you'll be prompted to advise some peer reviewers. Sometimes, you can besides nominate a few potential reviewers to exclude. Have yous ever wondered what editors do with these suggestions? I can't answer on behalf of every editor, just I can give some advice to make your suggestions as useful to the editor every bit possible.

Let'due south outset with excluded reviewers, sometimes called opposed reviewers. Information technology'south proficient practice to exclude active collaborators or anyone else yous have a non-obvious disharmonize with. (More on conflicts later.) You also might oppose a reviewer because of a personal disagreement, a alien approach to your work, or a sense based on past interactions that this person would not comment on your manuscript adequately. For most reasonable requests, that'southward your business. We don't need to know why you've chosen to oppose a reviewer or what personal history might exist. We just want to go your manuscript reviewed equally fairly as possible.

There's an urban legend amid some authors that this is all editorial gamesmanship, that at that place's no surer way for an editor to invite a reviewer than yous asking to exclude them. At the very least, I can assure yous that's non the case. We accept requests to exclude reviewers seriously—equally long as they're feasible. If your field is small, and y'all ask to exclude xv of the nearly active researchers in information technology, we may not be able to honor every one of your suggestions. Recollect of information technology like jury selection in a legal drama: yous get a certain number of people you can strike from the pool, no questions asked. Simply you can't strike the entire pool.

There take been even more than farthermost requests for excluded reviewers. My colleagues dear to tell the stories of 1 author who requested that no reviewer from Stanford exist invited, another who attempted to oppose the entirety of France. There are a lot of countries in the world, and even more than institutions. Nosotros might inadvertently comply with requests like that. Merely it also might happen that by the time nosotros've worked through good candidates in the US and Germany and Korea and Australia, we really do need to invite a French reviewer. The narrower your request for excluded reviewers, the more than likely we'll be able to honor it.

How almost suggested reviewers? Just as the myth persists that the opposed reviewers immediately go to the front of the invitation line, some authors believe that editors throw the list of suggested reviewers right in the trash—or read it, then make every effort not  to invite those people. This is also not the case. If we found no value in our authors' reviewer suggestions, we would not ask you to waste your time giving them.

That'south not the same thing as saying that nosotros e'er invite every single one of the reviewers that our authors suggest, for every single manuscript. My personal approach is to invite suggested reviewers unless there's a reason not to. Other editors adopt the mix-and-match method of inviting one or two of the suggested reviewers along with a few other experts they know personally and who take previously written insightful reviews for the journal. Regardless of an private editor's approach, though, we practice at least consider the suggestions—and there good and non-so-good means to brand them. Here are some best practices for making sure your reviewer suggestions are equally useful to the editorial office as possible.

• Don't  ever assume that the near famous professor or the researcher with the highest h-alphabetize is the best suggestion. I like to retrieve of this as the "Jennifer Doudna tin't review every CRISPR newspaper" principle. There are a couple of reasons for this. Showtime, these kinds of highly accomplished people go an overwhelming number of requests to review beyond their other responsibilities equally heads of research institutes, higher deans, club presidents, and so on. They simply might not accept time to give your paper the attention it deserves. Second, we as editors are enlightened of these people already. What we're more interested in is the name of an intelligent, insightful colleague who we might not have had a hazard to work with earlier.

• Exercise  propose reviewers with some expertise in the topic of the manuscript. Dissimilar journals have different perspectives on how specifically they want their reviewers' expertise to match the subject area of the paper, and the situation is not always the same from manuscript to manuscript. Only it usually will not aid usa much if you propose an expert in medical imaging when your newspaper is on drug delivery, with the justification that you're both biomedical engineers. What will help, though, is suggesting some reviewers with expertise in each aspect of your manuscript, especially if information technology's highly interdisciplinary. If your paper is about nanoparticles for illness treatment, consider suggesting experts in both nanotechnology and the illness you're interested in.
• Don't  suggest emeritus professors. Some, of course, will happily still review papers. But some decline every invitation, and most never respond to the email invitation at all. Allow them enjoy their retirement.
• Practise  attempt to diversify your reviewer suggestions, in any attribute of diversity that might be meaningful. Tenured professors can give groovy comments—merely and then tin can banana professors, and they might be more eager to express their vocalism through peer review. There might exist a burgeoning research group in your field in China, and including Chinese reviewers in the procedure could be a peachy way to connect your communities, or to go a dissimilar perspective on your work than a reviewer in your domicile country might have provided.
• Don't  advise a co-author of your paper. You'd call up this would be obvious. Information technology has happened.
• Do  give some caption for your suggestion, especially if there isn't an obvious connection between the suggested reviewer and your manuscript. Peradventure the suggested reviewer has taught classes on the topic, supervised master'due south students, or recently applied for and received a large grant to do enquiry in the field. Whatever of those could compellingly indicate expertise still wouldn't be obvious from a simple look through publication history.

• Don't  suggest the same reviewers for your submissions over and over over again. If yous've submitted 3 papers to the same journal, and gave the aforementioned suggestions each time, we as editors haven't learned annihilation new virtually the experts in your field. Plus, even if I used all of your suggestions last time and got brilliant comments, I've already read those people's thoughts on your work and would be much more inclined to invite someone different this time.

I affair I didn't list higher up is conflicts of interest. Defining conflicts of interest for peer reviewers is a bit of an art in itself. At a minimum, nosotros would not invite a current collaborator, a colleague from your aforementioned establishment, or someone you have a personal relationship with to review your newspaper. The catchy thing is that some of these can be hard to identify. For instance, please don't advise someone y'all recently started to interact with, especially if that collaboration hasn't resulted in any publications yet, because that new collaboration won't be possible to observe in the publication record. On the other hand, if you and a potential reviewer both served on an organizing commission a few years back, contributed to the aforementioned many-author position newspaper, or something forth those lines, I don't consider information technology a prohibitive conflict of involvement—although other editors might, and some reviewers might also.

What if you lot've published research together more recently? That requires some nuanced consideration. The inquiry hither is not the exact number of prior co-publications you accept or the time since you've terminal published together, it's whether the reviewer can requite an unbiased review of your manuscript. Some editors do have strict numerical cutoffs: they might consider it a conflict if y'all've published together at all in the terminal three years, or if you lot have at to the lowest degree five co-publications over whatever length of fourth dimension. I personally don't have a hard rule here, but I'll at to the lowest degree look through the concluding few years of a potential reviewer's publication history and generally non invite that person if there's been frequent collaboration with the author. Nearly editors will also non invite reviewers who have been a straight mentor or mentee of any of the manuscript's authors, regardless of how long agone it might have been.

Judging institutional conflict can as well be tough. Some extremely well-continued researchers have joint or courtesy appointments in as many as five to ten institutions just only i or ii habitation departments where they do all of their work. But like we can't exclude all of France, it might not be feasible—or desirable—to exclude every potential reviewer with a Harvard Medical School amalgamation simply because one of the third author's six affiliations is a enquiry found associated with HMS. The indicate here is to be judicious when suggesting reviewers who share affiliations with one or more than of the authors considering information technology tin be hard for u.s.a. equally editors to sympathize the depth of that relationship.

Personal connections are my favorite category of reviewer suggestions to talk about, because a reviewer invitation sent to someone you're connected to can become dramatically wrong, yet it'southward something that we editors are the to the lowest degree aware of. I once had an author suggest her own PhD adviser as a reviewer—and I ended up inviting him, considering I didn't know most that relationship. How did that happen? She had been running her own lab for long enough that the co-publications didn't announced in the engagement range that I typically check. Her website listed her publications but equally a PI, non as a student. And she was publishing nether a different surname than she did when she was in grad school. We work difficult to catch conflicts, but we don't have every bookish family tree committed to retentiveness. There are some border cases like this one that nosotros'll never be able to spot before doing something embarrassing. (Likewise, I one time compiled a list of prospective reviewers that, unknown to me at the fourth dimension, independent the author's wife! The merely reason I avoided embarrassment here is that iii people farther upwards the listing happened to agree to review before I invited her.)

If you're aware of a colleague in ane of these categories of conflict, especially one that we as editors might be less likely to know about, it's e'er helpful to list that colleague as an opposed reviewer. It's even better if you add an explanation that this person is a new collaborator, an old mentor, or something similar.

Finally, as nosotros've talked about many times in the past, once you become the reviewer comments, don't presume you can tell who left which comment. Suggested reviewers can go out comments that are just every bit harsh—or just as supportive—equally those from any other reviewer.

In summary, if you lot were coming upwards with the platonic reviewer suggestion, it would be an active researcher with expertise in at to the lowest degree some aspect of your manuscript, with that relevant expertise explained. This person would not be the single almost accomplished researcher you can think of but would ideally be someone who could bring a new perspective to your work, maybe even someone the editor is unfamiliar with. He or she would be someone you are not currently collaborating with and don't work down the hall from. And this person would absolutely not be your co-author, graduate adviser, or spouse. If y'all can advise a scattering of people who fit those criteria, fifty-fifty if we don't end upwards inviting all of them, you've done a great job and have helped united states of america a lot.

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Matt is the editor of Trends in Biotechnology, Cell Press'southward domicile for reviews in the practical biological sciences. His background is not and so secretly in engineering science rather than biology, but he hopes yous won't hold that confronting him. He can ofttimes be found crafting and enjoying fine beverages (which is definitely biotechnology) and blogging about strategy game design (which is surprisingly similar to managing a reviews periodical).

Filed to Reviews, Peer review, Go published, Cell Mentor

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Source: http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/suggesting-peer-reviewers