Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021
The assumption of expertise trap
Strategic writing
The reading toolkit
Something in the last paragraph may have puzzled you. We wrote “if the reviewer is a non-expert”. Why “if”? Isn’t the reviewer always an expert? This may come as a surprise, but it is unlikely that your reviewers are all subject experts. But if they aren’t, why have they agreed to review your paper? The selection of a minimum number of reviewers is the job of the editor and associate editors. In order of priority, your reviewers are likely to come from three sources.
· Reviewers who have worked for that journal before, and who are a good fit for the keywords of your paper. Note that the fit will never be perfect! The editor may want to select several reviewers to cover different aspects of your paper. Methodology experts may not necessarily be expert in your specific domain but will evaluate your approach and methodology fairly. Likewise, some “big picture” domain experts will have a better understanding of the significance of your work, but may not necessarily be experts in the approach you chose.
· The list of authors you cite in your references, even if they have not yet been reviewers for that journal. They may be sought out as long as their paper is well cited, and they are seen as being able to comment on the validity of your approach/methodology (but not necessarily on its field of application!)
· As a last resort, the list of reviewers you have suggested in your cover letter or online. Even though these suggested reviewers might be better than some of those chosen by the journal, the editor will only consider them if they do not gather enough reviewers from their usual sources. Since the editor may not know why you propose these reviewers, it would greatly help if you mention why they are particularly qualified to help in the review. Remember that the reviewers you propose cannot have been involved in projects or publications with you in the last three years (or more) and must not belong to the same institution.
Once potential reviewers are identified, the journal will send them your manuscript’s title and abstract, and ask whether they are interested in giving their feedback. The reviewers may choose to decline the review if the topic does not interest them or if they are too busy. After all, if they do accept, they will have to spend a considerable amount of time critiquing the paper for absolutely no pay. Most scientists agree that the peer review process is critical to maintaining the integrity of scientific practice. But there are also more pragmatic reasons to serve as a reviewer. Being a reviewer gives one the opportunity to read about the latest findings in a field before anyone else (as the publishing process can take 6 months from submission or more to complete). The insights gleaned from the review could yield a competitive advantage in research or save the reviewer’s time on preliminary experiments.
Remember how we asked the reviewers in our classes how long it takes them to make a decision about an article? We polled the same group of participants to ascertain if they were always full experts on the topics they agreed to review. Shockingly, only roughly a third of the participants said that they were. This demonstrates that a great deal of non-experts or partial experts21 are reviewing papers for journals!
Under the highly generous assumption that 80% of your three reviewers are full experts, what are the odds that at least one of them is a non- or partial expert? We could express this problem mathematically as “what are the odds that not all three reviewers are full experts?” or [1 − (80%*80%*80%)]. The answer is 0.488, or 48.8%. Does knowing that there is a nearly one-in-two chance of having a non-expert reviewer change the way you should write your paper? Can you afford to be as technical as you originally envisioned? Can you afford to assume that the reviewer will understand the assumptions you have made in your experiment or model?
Do not assume your reviewer is a full expert—your identical scientific twin. Write also for the non-expert reviewer.