From the Editor—On Peer Review: Improving the Credibility of Social Work Scholarship

Abstract

Scholarly peer review is the process of having research and other scholarship submitted for the scrutiny of experts in the field to determine their opinion. JSWE and most other academic journals use blinded peer review to advise the editor on the relevance, coherence, and credibility of submitted manuscripts. We keep a list of more than 200 reviewers who represent a variety of social work programs, interest areas, and methodological foci. To be a good reviewer, one must have the willingness to perform a review and the time to perform that task carefully and completely. Further, reviewers must have broad and deep knowledge of at least one problem area or at least one methodological approach (preferably both), enough selfawareness to remain unbiased in their criticisms of blinded manuscripts, sufficient writing skills to explain in detail how manuscripts need to be revised, and enough patient beneficence to word their criticisms as kindly as possible. I am extremely grateful to the many reviewers who consistently respond to our requests to review manuscripts, complete the reviews on time, and write thorough reviews that focus on a manuscript's potential contribution to the field, its grounding in previous social work scholarship, the rigor and reproducibility of methods, and the logic of exposition. On the other hand, some contributors who have submitted manuscripts to JSWE wait a longer time than they, or we, would like before learning whether the paper has been accepted. When I assumed the role of editor-in-chief, one of my personal goals for the journal was to reduce the time to make decisions because social work scholars, and in particular pretenure faculty members, need to be able to see their publications accepted for publication and in print. Although I have made some progress in this regard, we still experience some dismaying delays in the review progress, and much of this delay is because of the difficulty in finding reviewers for a given manuscript. Sometimes we need to ask more than five people on our list of reviewers before we can find someone to accept a manuscript based on the title and the abstract. Occasionally we need to ask even more potential reviewers if they will accept a manuscript. Why is it sometimes so difficult to find a reviewer? Most of us would agree that faculty are busy people, and being a journal reviewer is not a priority. It might be that a manuscript does not seem interesting or might not be firmly in one's substantive or methodological areas of expertise. If these reasons explain the difficulty in locating reviewers, then JSWE staff need to find ways to increase our pool of reviewers. Even if all social work faculty members served a 3-year term as a reviewer, the question of whether service as a reviewer is more work than it is worth would remain. Although many of us derive intrinsic rewards for reviewing manuscripts, such as keeping up with current research or seeing other reviewers' comments about a manuscript, serving as a reviewer is usually seen by our fellow faculty member...

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