Peer Review as Emergent Collaboration
Peer review is not just gatekeeping, but also collaboration.
When helping new students cope with disappointing reviews, pointing out incorrect, silly, or outright ridiculous statements can have an almost cathartic effect. My practice is to meet with the student and go through the reviews line by line to offer a balanced view on the feedback. Sometimes I will say something to the effect of “that’s stupid, ignore that comment.”
However, I have realized that not only is this counterproductive against helping the students (and myself) learn, but it also breeds belligerent future reviewers and more stress in the peer review process. Rather than taking an antagonistic approach, a more productive view is to treat reviewers as anonymous collaborators.
Sure, we all receive bad reviews from time. I have even outlined the mistakes that reviewers (often) make in a previous post. However, despite being a professional receiver of rejections (as all academics tend to become over time), I choose to believe that reviewers in general do not harbor ill will against me. Inelegant or insulting comments typically come from haste rather than malice. Even factually incorrect statements often arise out of errors in communication on behalf of the authors (at least partly). And sometimes reviewers make honest mistakes. This (idealized?) view of the world is much preferable to the paranoid feeling that reviewers are out to get you.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of reviewer antagonism, both in responses to reviews as well as — indirectly — in reviews themselves.
The most obvious examples come from my experience as editor or program committee member (or co-chair) for scientific journals and conferences. While most authors typically manage to hide anger or annoyance in their responses to reviews (such as rebuttals or revision reports), I have still seen many snippy, disdainful, or even angry author comments. If you’re writing a review response yourself and find yourself writing such a comment, eliminate it. At best, such comments will be ignored; at worst, they may be cause for the paper to be rejected. It may feel good to get something off your chest, but the power balance in the review process is not tilted in your favor. Even if you know your paper will be rejected, if you write something petty or angry in the rebuttal, there is a risk that the reviewers will remember you unfavorably.
A related pet peeve of mine is the arrogant authors who refuse to give in to reviewer feedback and just fight it out in the review response. Instead of improving their paper for the benefit of all readers, they fight tooth and nail to not yield an inch. It is unproductive and needlessly confrontational.
Taking this a step further, I would argue that many “bad” reviews arise from belligerent reviewers who, after having been treated unfairly in the review process themselves, now have an axe to grind. Such sentiment is exacerbated if the narrative around peer review has been inflated or inflamed; for example, by a co-author, advisor, or mentor who disdains peer review and demonizes reviewers. We don’t need more animosity in the review process; it is stressful enough as it is.
Instead, a better way to view peer review is that your reviewers are actually unwitting collaborators helping you improve your work. In fact, this is a form of emergent collaboration, where people who are not actually working together can contribute to improve a common artifact (the paper). While today’s journal and conference peer review processes are hardly set up to facilitate this, I think it would be more productive and less stressful to think of the process in this manner. After all, the most useful feedback for a paper you are preparing is often to get an external person to review it and give their honest feedback. Viewing actual peer review through this lens can turn it from an adversarial to a collaborative process.
