Category: Academic Publishing

How to Write a Good Review

Whether you’re a graduate student or a full professor, or somewhere in between, participating in the peer review process by serving as a manuscript reviewer provides an essential service to the wider scholarly community. It’s an opportunity to use your expertise to help fellow researchers strengthen their contribution to their field.

But in addition to agreeing to review a manuscript, it’s also important to provide a review that will both help the authors revise their manuscript and help the editors decide its fate. We asked members of the PSJ editorial team for their advice on crafting a strong review.

  1. Follow the Golden Rule. Treat other scholars like you want to be treated. There are real people behind the manuscript you’re evaluating: be constructive, not destructive. Write a review such that you wouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed if your name was publicly attached to it.

  2. Triage your critiques. It can be helpful for reviewers to categorize their critiques as major versus minor, so that the editors and authors get a sense of the weight to assign to the critique.

  3. Point the authors in the right direction. If you recommend literature that the authors should discuss, provide enough detail for the authors to find the citations you suggest. Relatedly, be specific about the scholarship with which you want the authors to engage. Something like “needs to have a strong literature review” is not helpful.

  4. Engage the authors on their terms. Evaluate the paper that was submitted, not the paper that you wish was submitted. Admittedly, this is a blurry line. But if heeding your advice would require a near-total overhaul, you’ve probably gone too far. In that situation, you may want to recommend that the journal reject the manuscript.

  5. Give the editors comments too. If you have overall thoughts or concerns or praise related to a manuscript, particularly as it relates to the broader literature or discipline or state-of-the-art of a method, don’t hesitate to take advantage of the option to provide separate comments to the editors (which are blinded to the authors). This is where you can raise issues that you can’t necessarily expect authors to address because they may be too fundamental.

  6. Keep an eye on the big picture. Think about how a paper adds to the broader literature or scholarship and discuss this in your review. This may not be essential for the authors, who already ought to know how they contribute, but it can be very helpful to the editors who make final decisions about a manuscript.

  7. Say something positive. If a manuscript is sent out for peer review, it’s because the editors see potential in it. Accordingly, even if you feel that the manuscript isn’t the best fit for the journal, or you identify crucial flaws or oversights, odds are that the manuscript still has some redeeming qualities. Make sure to highlight these even as you lay out your concerns.

Tips From the Editors

In the last few weeks, we have explained a few key pieces of advice that our editorial team thought would be helpful for prospective authors. This week, we will highlight a couple more suggestions from our team.

Tip #3: Don’t Bury the Lede

Tell the reader why your work is important! Associate Editor Gwen Arnold pointed out, “Authors, myself included, often write initial drafts similar to how they might tell a story, building a narrative arc and reaching a climax and then a resolution that delivers a moral or message.” She goes on to explain that this approach can cause authors to explain the most important aspects of their work later in the paper. Instead, make it clear to readers why your work is innovative and novel. State the key takeaways of your paper in the abstract, the introduction, the discussion, and then again in the conclusion. Don’t make reviewers, editors, and readers dig around for the lede; make it obvious so that you can grab their attention and keep them reading.

Tip #4: Intellectual Identity

Every journal, researcher, and individual work has what Editor-in-Chief Geoboo Song calls an “intellectual identity.” This includes the questions investigated, the methods used, and the topics and theories of focus. We recommend putting in the effort to make sure your work’s intellectual identity aligns with the journal’s. Read through a journal’s recent publications, social media posts, and website to gain a grasp on its identity. After that, take a look at the editorial team. Try to look through their research to discover their individual identities — after all, they are the ones who make most of the manuscript decisions. Finally, go back over your paper. Does it seem to fit with the collective intellectual identity? Would this journal’s readers be interested in your work? 

Academic publication is a competitive process, especially at journals like PSJ that receive a large volume of submissions. Hopefully, these tips from our editorial team will be of use to you when you are submitting your next paper.

Tips From the Editors

We have previously discussed how authors should engage with the ongoing academic conversation in the journal in which they hope to be published. Our editors pointed out that good papers tend to incorporate and build upon the key questions and developments in the field. Here we address the logistics of manuscript processing.

Tip #2: Pay Attention to the Details

Academic journals get hundreds of submissions every year. Each paper that is submitted must be read and evaluated by a member of the editorial team. Editorial Associate Ben Galloway said, “I think one of the most important things I have learned as a part of the editorial team is the process behind manuscript processing and sorting-specifically.” There are several characteristics of a paper, aside from the quality of the writing and research, that are considered within this process.

Originality is always a top priority. Ensure that your work is your own. Any research from other scholars used in your work should be properly cited. Double-check that quotations and concepts are attributed to their original author and source. The same advice applies when you are referencing your own work!

Also make sure you submit an anonymized version of your paper, and pay attention to the journal’s instructions for authors, including style guidelines and word limit.

Finally, don’t forget the cover letter. Authors may underestimate the impression a well-written cover letter can have on the editorial team. “I always read cover letters very closely,” says Editor-in-Chief Geoboo Song. Use your cover letter as an opportunity to make a strong case for your paper to be published. Explain how your paper fits well in the journal and why your work will be of interest to its readers.

Tips From the Editors

Getting your research published can be a difficult and daunting task. We asked our editorial team to draw on their experiences as editors to offer some advice to scholars. In this ongoing series, we will compile, summarize, and relay our editorial team’s thoughts and observations with the goal of helping prospective authors as they prepare to submit their work for publication.

Tip #1: Engage with the Literature

Several members of our editorial team emphasized the importance of engaging with the existing literature. The works featured in PSJ are theory-driven pieces of policy research that often build upon one another. It is clear that the authors published in PSJ have incorporated the developments and key questions presented in the journal into their own work. It is imperative that researchers ask new questions and supply the community with new ideas; however, one must ensure that the questions and ideas presented fit into the scholarly conversation. As Associate Editor Gwen Arnold put it, “…it has to be a real conversation, not a monologue.”

A quick way to gauge how well you have participated in a journal’s academic conversation is to check your bibliography. For an article to sufficiently engage with the intellectual essence of a given journal, it should reference several works published in said journal. This will, of course, only give you a surface-level evaluation of how well the piece has incorporated the relevant literature. Associate Editor Holly Peterson points out that manuscripts can do a good job at drawing on previous developments and adding to the common themes and topics, but a particularly strong manuscript “builds these themes into the very thinking of the piece, not just in the framing of the research, but in its foundations, conceptualizations, and substantive findings.”

In summary, while drafting your article, consider how well you engage with a journal’s existing literature. Try to make this engagement obvious. Readers should be able to plainly see how your work adds to the ongoing conversation and understand how your research contributes to its progress. “Making the findings of the article clearly connected to ongoing conversations in the journal,” Associate Editor Aaron Smith-Walter says, “is an excellent way to elevate the chances that the piece finds a home in its pages.” Keeping this in mind before submitting your paper can help your work stand out and give it the nudge it may need to be on its way to publication.

Just and Equitable Citation

For many of us, the reference list we assemble at the end of a paper is one step above an afterthought: generated by citation management software, hopefully formatted correctly by the same. For me, the exception occurs if my paper exceeds the page or word limit for a journal I’m targeting. To avoid cutting precious text, I’ll comb through my citations, trying to find places where I could use one instead of three, getting rid of less-than-crucial examples, excising the “see also” and “e.g.” In a low moment a few years ago, wrestling with an unwieldy reference list, I actually tried to convince myself that nobody really needs their middle initial. That was when it dawned on me that citation is not a neutral practice. Collectively, our choices about who to include and exclude, and how and why, shapes our literature: who counts in it, and how much.

Other folks got the memo before me. A number of studies show that citations in political science journals tend to underrepresent female and minority scholars (Bruening and Sanders 2007; Dion et al. 2018; Dion and Mitchell 2020; Teele and Thelen 2017) as do journals in other disciplines (Bertolero et al. 2020; Caplar et al. 2017; Chatterjee and Werner 2021; Dworkin et al. 2020; Maliniak et al. 2013; Odic and Wojcik 2020; Roberts et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021). This phenomenon appears to be driven by some combination of:

Building a diverse, equitable, and vibrant community of policy scholars requires that we try to mitigate these biases. But how? Fundamentally we need major changes in how we train, hire, and support scholars, so that academia welcomes rather than erects barriers for women, minorities, non-traditional and first-generation scholars, and other groups subject to discrimination and bias. This should be shared goal we all strive to achieve. A small but actionable step forward is to consider explicitly the composition of our reference lists and, to the extent we find gender or racial imbalances, make a conscious effort to cite more scholarship by women and underrepresented minorities. We encourage all PSJ authors to take this step. Some tools to help in that assessment include:

PSJ has taken another small but nonetheless important step. In 2021, we stopped counting reference lists in the overall word count for an article. Limiting reference lists may cause authors to sacrifice newer scholarship, which may be produced by diverse scholars, in favor of older, core scholarship produced by less diverse authors. Our continuing aim is to eliminate this incentive.

Are there other steps that you would like to see PSJ or other political science or policy science journals take to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in our scholarly community? Do you have recommendations for how we as individual scholars can tackle this charge, or how we should approach it when acting collectively? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

-Gwen Arnold, Associate Editor

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