The Steps In Peer Review And Its Importance

Students are often requested to review the essays and the term papers of their peers. What is the reason behind that? This is a learning process for both the readers as well as the writers in several ways. It will give the person writing the essay or article a chance to hear how the others perceive it. The following are the steps in peer review and their importance.

Send the Article to an Editor

When you send your article to an editor of a peer reviewed journal, he or she will forward it to the group of scholarly reviewers. However, before that the editor will verify how relevant your article is to the journal and will check the policy of the journal for publishing such papers. He will then send the article for review by the peer reviewers.

The Editor Will Get It Reviewed

In order to help decide whether the paper is worth publishing or not, the editor in chief will ask a board of editors to study the comments that the peer reviewers have written. In case the paper has been accepted for publication, then the author or authors of the article will be sent questions that they have to answer. If not, then they will be sent a rejection letter. The ambiguities in the article have to be cleared by the author, if any, in due time. When you receive the resubmitted paper with the questions answered on a separate sheet, the reviewers will look for the comments of the author and then, write their own comments. If the answers to the questions are approved, the article would finally get published in the journal or will be put in a queue for publication so that it would be published when your turn comes. It is highly important since without peer review, the quality of the article cannot be determined.