Peer review is central to the process of scholarly publishing, providing authors with valuable feedback on their work, acting as a quality control and informing the editor’s decision-making process.
If your journal uses SAGE track (based on Scholar One Manuscripts), or another online peer review system, you can use this to maintain a database of your reviewers and monitor how frequently you are calling on them to review for you. If you don’t use SAGE track, we recommend that you build your own database of reviewers in order to track who has reviewed for you and when to help avoid overburdening reviewers wherever possible.
If your journal uses SAGE track (SAGE’s online manuscript submission portal), you can use this to maintain a database of your reviewers and monitor how frequently you are calling on them to review for you. If you don’t use STS, we recommend that you build your own database of reviewers in order to track who has reviewed for you and when to help avoid overburdening reviewers wherever possible.
Though many reviewers value the opportunity to participate in scholarly dialogues in this way as highly regarded experts in their field, by and large reviewing papers is unpaid and can add significantly to their overall workload.
The academic publishing community relies on an enormous amount of goodwill from reviewers and at SAGE we are keen to ensure that our reviewers feel appreciated and valued. This will hopefully encourage reviewer participation and improve the timeliness and quality of reviews.
Over the last few years, several studies have looked into whether peer-reviewers are over-burdened with review commitments and requests. The Scholarly Kitchen posted a blog on 21st September 2010 discussing the findings of three such surveys (Are Peer-Reviewers Overloaded? Or Are Their Incentives Misaligned?). These surveys concluded the following in terms of encouraging participation and incentivising reviewers:
Read the full post on Scholarly Kitchen.
At SAGE, we offer all reviewers free access to SAGE Journals Online (more than 630 journals across the humanities, social sciences and science, technical and medical.) for 30 days. Any reviewers appointed to the board would receive a free print and online subscription to the journal, as per our standard policy.
We also offer reviewers a 25% discount on SAGE books.
As a journal editor, remembering to let reviewers know the final outcome and providing feedback on the quality of the review, especially for newer academics, is appreciated and useful; acknowledging regular reviewers in the journal, for example listing them in the final issue of the year, is also a simple way of highlighting their contribution to the journal.
Thomson Reuters has produced a report outlining the ways in which you can use online peer review systems to improve the peer review process.