We received a question at the Nature Network ‘Ask the Editor’ forum which I thought readers of this blog might find useful.

Q: I once reviewed several manuscripts for a good journal, but it is on behalf of my Ph.D boss. Now, I am a postdoc and wonder how to become a reviewer? Thanks for any suggestions.

A. At Nature, we ask our peer-reviewers to identify anyone who helps them with their review. (The reviewers promise to keep the ms confidential, in advance of being sent it, and undertake to ensure that anyone they show it to also keeps it confidential). Therefore, we often discover (and regularly use) good new reviewers by this method. Many senior reviewers ask junior colleagues to review a ms as part of their mentoring, and are very good at assigning credit to these junior colleagues.

I suggest that if you help your boss or another colleague with his or her reviews in future, you ask that person to name you as a collaborator when he/she sends the journal the review, so your name gets known.

If you have been a co-author on your boss’s papers, you could contact the journal that published the work and offer to review (providing the information that you’ve published in that journal).

I think that as you publish in your own right, journal editors will get to know of you and start to ask you to review for them.

If you meet any journal editors at conferences you attend, you could let them know that you’d be interested in peer-reviewing for their journal.

Good luck!

Q. Dear Nature Editors,

I am an editorial assistant for a journal published by the American Educational Research Association, which has just changed editorial teams.The current team is interested in improving the quality of the journal. Your journal was selected because of it’s caliber. We are particularly interested in knowing if you have guidelines that manuscript reviewers are asked to follow. If you do have guidelines for your reviewers,we would like to request a copy.

Thank you for your time,

Editorial Assistant

A. Dear Dr Editorial Assistant

Thank you for your message. Yes, the Nature journals have reviewer guidelines and a peer-review policy. You can access all relevant information on our peer-review web page.

Please let me know if, having read this page and the associated pages, you have any more questions. These pages are public information; you are welcome to copy and redistribute them so long as you cite the source (eg the URL).

Best wishes

Maxine Clarke

Nature

www.nature.com/nature/authors/

Q. I am writing to ask you about the minimal standards required by your journal concerning statistical analyses in submitted manuscripts.

I am a biostatistician. A colleague, a biomedical researcher, insists that there are no sample size requirements as long as the minimum statistical power is achieved. To be more concrete, consider a simple two-group t-test where each group is of size n=3 and the power calculations show that the power=80% (a widely accepted standard). My argument is that statistics on sample size of n=3 per group does not make much sense in terms of reliability, but my colleague insists that because the power is 80%, a manuscript will be acceptable to your journal despite the meagre sample size.

Is my colleague right or wrong? Are there any minimal standards on statistics that manuscripts submitted to your journal should satisfy, and how can one find them?

A. The Nature journals do have a statistical checklist, available on Nature’s website as a one-page (44KB) Word document download. We welome volunteers from suitably qualified scientists to act as statistical referees for us. (If any such people read this posting, please drop your address details in the comments.) We also welcome suggestions for improving our checklist — are there other elements we need to add?