How to Make Scientists into Better Peer Reviewers

From efforts to increase the transparency of the review process to initiatives offering training, there are many attempts underway to make better reviewers out of researchers.

Written byAbby Olena, PhD

| 9 min read

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California State University, Fresno, biologist Ulrike Müller received her worst peer review when she was a graduate student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the late 1990s, after submitting a paper about the dynamics of swimming fish to the Journal of Experimental Biology, she received an extremely short response—just a few lines long. “The person wrote that this paper was a missed opportunity because we didn’t invite him as a coauthor,” she says. “No suggestions. Just, ‘Sorry, this could’ve been a wonderful paper if only you’d asked me.’”

Müller’s PhD supervisor, John Videler, followed up, and the reviewer, who had hand-signed the review, asked Videler why he, the reviewer, hadn’t been invited to sit on Müller’s thesis committee. “For me it was ...

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Meet the Author

Abby Olena, PhD
As a freelancer for The Scientist, Abby reports on new developments in life science for the website. She has a PhD from Vanderbilt University and got her start in science journalism as the Chicago Tribune’s AAAS Mass Media Fellow in 2013. Following a stint as an intern for The Scientist, Abby was a postdoc in science communication at Duke University, where she developed and taught courses to help scientists share their research. In addition to her work as a science journalist, she leads science writing and communication workshops and co-produces a conversational podcast. She is based in Alabama.
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