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.

Abby 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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