examples of article reviews

examples of article reviews

Analyzing the Impact of Article Reviews in Academic Publishing

1. Introduction to Article Reviews

The nature of the review and editorial process has changed very little over the evolution of article-based scientific communication. Traditional peer review has been frequently critiqued in the literature, cited to address various limitations, and pressure for alternative review models, such as public/open peer review, has been mounting. The specific goals of open peer review vary, but these new models in general seek to increase transparency, reduce editorial bias, and indicate or even track the full process and outcomes of the review. With open peer review, authors and reviewers both know each other’s identities, reports and letters are typically publicly displayed alongside the published article, and in some cases, the public is invited to comment on the entire manuscript before the reviewer actually submits their report – transparent public peer review.

This study aims to understand the impact of article reviews in academic publishing. In part, this quantitative examination of offering authors the option to display their article review process to the public, visualize views of their article, and update their article with changes resulting from the review process informs the broader issue of the external signals of quality in academic publishing. Additionally, it examines a common critique of open peer review, i.e., it is thought to benefit only less-cited articles or instantiate a potential “vanity metric” of scholarly communication.

2. Benefits of Article Reviews in Academic Publishing

The advantage of publishing articles in the academic world is that it has the effect of dissemination of new items, and competition induces improvement in the efficiency of researchers by the review process. In particular, this review gives feedback or improves motivation for the improvement of the article by providing advice from a different perspective of an article. However, the amount of effort invested in the review process is only rewarded to the author through the review of his/her article, and no economic return occurs even in the article with high review evaluations. In addition, reviewing quality cannot be constantly guaranteed. Quality control of review quality is not maintained, and there is no motivation for improvement since high-quality reviews receive no payment. In this system, the review process does not satisfy either the initiator or the responder. For example, a predatory journal is taking the method of charging for the review which should be done by an author in a normal way.

One of the requester’s responsibilities is to gather reference articles to justify your research. There are several well-known databases such as the ISI-Web of Science, Scopus, and various academic search engines. However, it is not easy to distinguish between high- and low-quality articles from the database. That is, even if you download “interesting articles”, you need to pick up articles that contribute to your research. This work is very time-consuming for the researcher but is essential for good research. A necessary step in the process of gathering reference articles is the review of articles. These can be used as feedback on the article by their review or by indicating that the article’s evaluation is vague. Furthermore, the requester may provide useful advice from another perspective. Quality control of the article is improved by article reviews.

3. Challenges and Criticisms of Article Reviews

More awareness of the increasing percentage of erroneous or fabricated published data, biases, and special interest advocacy (hidden unfinished work or publication bans) is emerging. This negative impact of a scientific literature constructed from faulty or fraudulent primary data is well documented in many major research arenas. Several professional societies, regulatory agencies, and funding bodies are intensifying their efforts to diminish these fraudulent practices and biases effectively and in a timely manner. Prominent scientists in their discipline should be willing to recognize their responsibility to access, evaluate, and judiciously use relevant contemporary peer-reviewed literature. Their mentors, teaching institutions, funding agencies, and editors of journals should simultaneously share in the determination of keeping the scientific record clean and productive. This endeavor will naturally force some researchers to search harder or indeed to repeat experiments to ensure their sustainability for important societal consequences.

The practice of conducting peer reviews for scientific manuscripts has been thoughtfully debated for many years. The purpose of this time-honored tradition is to scrutinize assertions, methodology, and novel data analysis, as well as to assess the clarity of presentation and the appropriate citation of relevant literature. Despite professional embarrassment or worse associated with the publication of faulty or fraudulent data, referees have little lifetime accountability for the responsibility they bring to bear on the final version of a manuscript. Publishing findings that are proven later to be wrong undermines the ability of a scientific community to collaborate effectively with the public and its supporting government agencies or business enterprises. This retaliation against science can take various forms, most of which are seldom fully appreciated by the signatories on funding proposals or research contracts.

4. Best Practices for Writing and Responding to Article Reviews

Writing article reviews should also be perceived as an opportunity rather than a burden. The review process is an integral part of the development of scholarly research, and so becoming good at reviewing and providing feedback better prepares you to write and submit articles to journals. Furthermore, because editorial decisions are rarely, if ever, based solely on an analysis of article content, being asked to review an article does not necessarily mean that the article you submit to a journal will benefit or suffer from the review you are writing. Nevertheless, journals are where we want our academic work disseminated, so understanding the current criteria will assist scholars with engaging more successfully in the review process.

The purpose of article reviews is to provide feedback to the authors. Constructive feedback assists authors with analyzing the significance of what they have written in relation to these literatures, and with ensuring that they have a coherent argument and evidence to support their argument. Article reviews assist both authors and editors with determining whether readers can understand the questions that motivated the research, the impact of theory and previous research on the focal questions, the data and methods, generalization of the findings, the quality of the evidence, the author’s interpretation of the results, and the contribution.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

The ANPAD conference data were limited to journals of the business disciplines. Future research could validate the research findings across other disciplines using additional rankings for relevance and journal scope. Further research could investigate the channels of article exposure or research translation that would enhance the relevance of academic papers. Given the fast pace of globalization made possible through digital transformation, languages and geographical differences could affect the impact of peer review. Future research could examine the effectiveness of peer review across different countries. As a longer-term goal, a longitudinal study across different periods would examine if peer review parameters should vary in the current publishing landscape.

We have empirically demonstrated the effect of extended article review on the relevance evaluation of an article in the context of academic publishing. However, future research could examine whether the articulation and extension of article peer review influence the scope of a journal. The open access publishing model is an emerging publishing trend, and researchers with articles published under an open access license are attracting media attention. Open access repositories provide an avenue for unpublished or yet to be reviewed work to be shared with researchers at an early stage to gain a wider breadth of readers. Future research could evaluate the benefits of the extent and type of media attention over those for any article that is accessed by articles freely shared under open access.

Future Research: Future research in the field is needed for closer examination of the following issues.

While research funding and tenure decisions are highly related to the number of articles in “A” journals, the pressure to publish in prestigious journals has led to the flooding of these periodicals with a vast amount of articles. As a result, they are not able to absorb, by the mainstream of academic community in business, the enormous stock of research papers published in other journals, even if many of these works have an appreciable number of citations, including from scholars in other disciplines. We argue that this important aspect of importance has been overlooked. It is crucial to analyze and assess the specific type of attention acquired by the research production. Our conclusions suggest that the strategy of choosing journals for publication in order to secure some level of appreciable media impact should be revised. We also have shown that the positive relationship between review quality (on the basis of reviewer expertise) and publication quality disappears when the level of reviewing expertise is not taken into account since the reviewing process is a closed circuit of quality.

Main Findings: In this paper, we propose an instrument to study the impact of academic research in business fields, such as marketing, in terms of the immediate media attention that research articles receive. Our dataset covers 55 journals. Overall, we find several significant divergences between the current review criteria and the patterns of reviewers found in the examined business disciplines. These findings raise serious doubts and some concerns about the significance of peer review.