Reviewing, Reviewers and the Scientific Enterprise

Abstract

Despite their critical importance to the scientific enterprise, reviewers receive no formal training and reviewing has become a skill that they pick up through trial and error. Additionally, because most reviewers do not receive any feedback on their performance, any bad reviewing habits become entrenched over time. This has contributed to significant and unnecessary anxiety about reviewing and to antagonistic encounters between reviewers and authors. This paper seeks to correct this situation by defining reviewers as co-creators of scholarship and the reviewing as a quality control process in the production of scientific scholarship. The paper provides three groups of activities aimed at creating the right mindset among reviewers to facilitate this co-creation and quality control perspective: relationships, commitment and honest decisions and recommendations.reviewers, reviewing, scientific enterprise, scholarship, co-creations, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,