Hello all,

So I recently graduated with my DBA, and passed my dissertation, which is great. I work full-time in the transportation industry, so I am not a professor or full-time academic. However, I enjoy academia so much, I am writing papers and sharing on SSRN, and submitting to journals.

One journal belonging to Elsevier that I sent a manuscript to a while back wouldn't accept it because it was currently residing as a preprint on SSRN and arXiv, and I didn't want to pull it down. The editor from that same journal approached me a few weeks ago, and politely asked if I would be interested in being a peer reviewer for a manuscript. I agreed, and also completed the Certified Peer Reviewer Course. Yay me.

I did a complete, thoughtful, and constructive review of the paper which was in the field of marketing, and sent back my recommendation to the editor on time, along with a detailed document by section of the manuscript with my critique and helpful comments.

My thought after this first foray into peer reviewing is that the publishing process can be made better if people are taught early on how to critically review papers, and learn the essentials of the review process. Knowing what reviewers look for is nothing more than being the third eye that is reading for relevance, continuity, and helping the author to improve the paper to have the necessary appeal and usefulness to a reader.

This experience has given me a great appreciation for the fact that peer reviewing is very time consuming, and I can see how you might get some reviewers that might give snarky or condescending comments versus thoughtful evaluation. The manuscript I read had some weaknesses but still had merit, so I gave the authors some things to think about, and nuggets of information for suggested references to consider during their major revision (which is not my call but my recommendation).

I'm surprised that this exercise is not offered as a module in schools. Make each part of the module a case study of various classic paper flaws that need to be evaluated and see if people can recommend the correct fixes, and if they would approve or reject a paper. The important part of the review write-up was justifying why the authors should do X, Y and Z, and having some basis.

I would do this again, certainly.