How to Be the Reviewer You Want to Have (Webinar Recording)-How to Be the Reviewer You Want to Have Presentation

How to Be the Reviewer You Want to Have Presentation

Pdf Summary

This document is a guidance talk from Gail A. Bishop, Editor-in-Chief of <em>The Journal of Immunology</em>, on how to be a fair, effective scientific reviewer.

Key messages:
- Reviewing is valuable because it helps reviewers stay current in their field, sharpen critical thinking, improve their own writing, and build professional reputation.
- Reviewers should accept assignments only if they can provide a thoughtful, unbiased review on time.
- Bad motivations for reviewing include attacking competitors, promoting friends, revenge, or padding a CV without doing careful work.

The document outlines what to evaluate in a manuscript:
- Whether the rationale, hypothesis, methods, analyses, and controls are appropriate and sufficiently detailed.
- Whether the figures and legends support the conclusions, and whether alternative interpretations were considered.
- Whether experimental controls are adequate for reagents, antibodies, animal models, and human studies.
- Whether the work is novel, addresses an important question, and meaningfully advances knowledge.

It emphasizes best practices:
- Read carefully, remain open-minded, and write comments clearly, specifically, politely, and in an organized way.
- Be fair and realistic when requesting revisions; only ask for experiments that are truly essential to support conclusions.
- Prioritize comments into critical issues, nice-to-have improvements, and minor revisions.
- Do not include your publication recommendation in comments to authors; reserve that for editors.
- Avoid overly harsh, vague, or self-centered critiques.

The talk also addresses practical issues:
- Ask authors to cite your work only if there is a major omission.
- If involving trainees in review, do so for teaching, and you remain responsible for the final review.
- Before submitting, proofread carefully and check tone.

It concludes with advice for new reviewers: seek co-review opportunities, take review courses, contact editors, volunteer on journal portals, and always meet deadlines.

Keywords

scientific review

peer review

immunology

manuscript evaluation

critical thinking

experimental controls

constructive feedback

review ethics

editorial guidance

reviewer best practices