A round-up of review advice
There is quite a bit of advice and debate about peer review on various parts of nature.com at the moment, so I thought I'd round it up in this one post.
At The Sceptical Chymist blog, Catherine Goodman, an editor at Nature Chemical Biology, provides some thoughts on how to referee a paper, clarifying the journal's procedures and providing some tips.
Nature Medicine's August issue's Editorial set out what the journal seeks in its reviewers, asking readers how the journal can retain the best in the face of the plethora of requests to review from an increasing number of publications.
Over at Nature Network, there is a forum on peer-review in the Ask The Editor group, which addresses questions such as training of peer-reviewers and how Nature journal editors control the quality of the reviewing process.
In another Network Group, Nature Nanotechnology: Asia-Pacific and Beyond, journal editor Ai-Lin Chun asks "Do you know how to referee a paper?" and provides some answers to her readers. And the topic comes up again in the Publishing in the New Millennium forum, in the debate about the current state of science publishing.
As well as these blogs, forums and groups, the Nature Publishing Group Author and Reviewers' website has a page of peer-review information, including how to write a review for a Nature journal, what makes a good review, our peer-review policies, and why we operate the system of peer review that we do. And for a real, meaty discussion of how the Internet is affecting or may affect the publication process, you can read Nature's peer-review debate (22 articles) published in 2006.
