Exploring the Peer Review Process: What Is It, Does It Work, and Can It Be Improved?

Though peer review is central to science, the process itself has received little formal evaluation. Here we provide an overview to the literature on the peer-review process. Peer review has its drawbacks, including financial cost, time, reliability, and potential biases. An important gap in our knowledge is whether the process works. Although most manuscripts show some improvement after peer review, reviewers often disagree, and errors can escape the process. TO date, we do not know whether papers published with peer review are generally improved over those without. Most journals use a single-blind approach (author blind to reviewers), whereas others use a double-blind approach, and a few use an open approach. Biases toward authors (institutional, geographic, gender) apparently exist in some fields. Unlike the formal training we receive in fisheries research and management, no formal training process exists for peer review-without mentoring, how are new reviewers produced? Based on our literature Survey, we recommend consideration of double-blind review, implementation of a rating system for reviews of submitted manuscripts, and training and mentoring Students to become good reviewers.