EASE’s Four Considerations for Editors Regarding Peer Review Quality Assessment

The EASE Peer Review Committee have completed work on a new strand of our Peer Review Toolkit, to help journal editors and publishers assess the quality of peer review reports.

We are delighted to reveal EASE’s Four Considerations for Editors Regarding Peer Review Quality Assessment.

Any quality assessment process should begin with a thorough deliberation of what quality is and by providing detailed and clear guidance on quality to authors and reviewers.

Quality can relate to:

individual peer review report – its tone, clarity, timeliness, thoroughness, constructive feedback, absence of bias, degree of manuscript improvement etc.,
the overall quality of all reviewer reports or comments received for the same manuscript,
or the review process itself – timeliness, diversity of reviewer background and expertise, transparency, etc.

This new guide focuses on assessing the quality of a single review report, detailing four approaches that editors could take to help consider which aspects of quality are important for you, decide on approaches and techniques to measure them:

1. Asking authors to rate the review reports they receive
2. Asking reviewers to self-rate the review reports they submit
3. Rating the review reports you receive as an editor
4. Collaborating with researchers on rating your journal’s past review reports

We encourage you as editors, and your editorial teams to read this new guide in the Toolkit, and to begin assessing the quality of reviews to enhance the feedback to authors, and increase the quality of your journals.

We welcome feedback and comments on the new guide, and invite journals to share any assessments of the quality of peer review that they have reported, so we can link examples of such practices on our website.

EASE members, get involved in the discussion on the forum and share your thoughts on the new resource and your experiences of assessing reviews you receive as editors and authors.

Visit the Toolkit