Can we improve the peer review system?

摘要

I guess many authors have experience of receiving careless, erroneous, or unfair reviews for their papers. A careless review does not contain anything useful or relevant to the paper. Occa- sionally one finds the reviewer is clearly not an expert in the topic under discussion, but still makes a faulty argument to reject the paper. Maintaining the high quality of peer reviews is an all-important task for scholarly journals. In recent years, however, there have been many warn- ings that the current peer review system may not be sustainable [1]. Both the number of schol- arly journals and that of published research papers have been increasing rapidly. In addition, many journals are under great pressure to shorten review times. All these factors contribute to making it more difficult to secure appropriate reviewers and maintain a fair and thorough re- view process, especially when the journal is not a prestigious one.