We asked our authors what they consider to be the biggest obstacles when it comes to peer reviewing.

Author 1: The reader who just doesn’t connect with my approach, or even see what I’m trying to do. I’ve submitted manuscripts where one reviewer says “accept as is”; another says “this is hopeless”; and a couple of others say “it’s pretty good, how about making these changes?” As an author I look at each of these evaluations carefully. A good editor will know how to contextualise these varied reviews and work with the author on making improvements. New authors are particularly vulnerable to this sort of mixed set of reviews. I’ve advised a couple of new authors on how to address a set of reviews that were all over the place.

Author 2: My own laziness, which I try to overcome. It is the reviewers’ task to ask you to do changes and making such changes means investing more academic work, so it is a normal reaction if you feel that one wants to rebuke the suggested changes. My advice would be to avoid doing this if you can because revising the manuscript will always help you to improve the quality of your work.

Another obstacle is my sheepishness. One may encounter the odd nasty reviewer and it is a strategic error to attempt to please this person. If you feel that your work has not been treated fairly, the best practice is to rebuke the reviewer. In so doing, one should always be fair and civil, even if one feels that the review is patronising or offensive. Luckily, evil reviews are rare in my experience. 

Author 3: Time: I do a lot of reviewing for journals (though less nowadays than I used to), and so I tend to ‘ration’ the number of reviews I undertake — I gauge the topic and how interesting I think it is, in the field, also whether I know anything about it  (some areas I just don’t take on because I know I don’t know enough —e.g., speech disorders).

Author 4: The biggest obstacle is that, as a reviewer, you think how the book would look like if you wrote it yourself. It is sometimes difficult to be empathetic with the intentions of an author when you have your own ideas of how a book should ideally look like.

Author 5: The main issue that comes to my mind is how to handle situations in which multiple reviewers make apparently contradictory recommendations – but this is not something that can be pre-empted.

Author 6: I believe my main struggle is when I receive what I call an ‘impossible review’. That is, for instance, a review in which there is only negative comments but not constructive feedback, or a review in which they want you to change the paper and to adopt another theoretical framework, or a review in which they want you to redo the research with a different dataset, or a review in which they say the paper would benefit from changing the structure without giving even a hint as to what they might have in mind, etc. I welcome criticism and feedback (more often than not, this enables to improve the quality of the paper), but some comments are just impossible to address.

Author 7: In most cases, the reviews are fair, and I can counter the reviewer’s comments or criticisms. However, when the reviewer does not show any flexibility in accepting what I consider to be a reasonable viewpoint/opinion and seems to disagree with what I say no matter what, then I have problem. A worse case would be that some reviewer agrees to review my work, but never responds (or delays the whole procedure by extending deadlines indefinitely). This unfortunately often happens.

Author 8: If the question is about what bothers me when reading reviews of my work, then it’s mainly bias, as well as rude remarks. If it’s about me becoming a reviewer, then most naturally it’s the lack of time and often, lack of appropriate expertise (and one is still being asked). On the other hand, I consider peer review a very central duty and responsibility of research community and therefore, it is hard for me to refuse.

Author 9: An important obstacle is when the reviewer does not have the intellectual honesty to approach the review of work they do not fully understand (or who do not refrain from conducting such a review if that is the case), and then they give comments that are not useful at all, e.g. because they focus on aspects of the work that are not essential or relevant.

Author 10: Explaining (to the reviewer) that every author may have their own vision of the manuscript which may not be compatible with the vision of the reviewer. For instance, I was once asked to change the entire text because the reviewer didn’t like a wealth of expressions illustrating linguistic patterns (which was a clear advantage of the manuscript) and instead wanted me to focus on the analysis of a single word throughout the manuscript (because it was what he/she’d been accustomed to).