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Tag: Journals

  • Should You Nominate Your Own Peer Reviewers When You Submit?

    A lot of submission systems have a field for “suggested reviewers,” and a lot of authors skip straight past it because it looks optional and slightly awkward — like you’re picking your own examiner. Some journals require it outright. Either way, it’s worth filling in properly, because it’s one of the only points in the entire peer-review process where you get any say over who reads your paper.

    Here’s the one-line version, and the one worth repeating to a labmate who’s about to skip the box: a generalist editor usually knows less about your specific subfield than you do, so naming a genuinely qualified reviewer is helping them, not gaming the system.

    Why the box exists

    Journal editors, especially at broad-scope or generalist journals, cover far more ground than any one person can be an expert in. An editor handling submissions across an entire subdiscipline is not going to know, off the top of their head, who the three best people in the world are to assess your specific method. You do. That’s the entire logic behind the request — it isn’t the journal outsourcing its judgment to you, it’s the journal asking the person with the most specialist knowledge in the room where to look.

    It’s also, as Writing Tip 12 points out, not the free pass it sounds like. Recommendations are non-binding on both sides: editors regularly ignore suggested names entirely, and nominated reviewers are just as free to decline. Nobody is quietly stacking their own review panel here — you’re offering a shortlist, not choosing a jury.

    How to build a list worth submitting

    The useful version of this list takes fifteen minutes, not thirty seconds. A few things worth getting right:

    • Aim for 7–10 names whose own published work sits close to yours — not adjacent, close. Contacting them beforehand is fine but not required.
    • Rule out anyone with a conflict of interest before you rule anyone in: current colleagues, anyone at your institution, anyone with a financial stake in the outcome.
    • Consider people you’ve cited. They already know the area cold, and they have their own reason to want your representation of the field to be accurate.
    • Mix career stages. Early-career researchers are more likely to accept a review request and to give it real time, precisely because they haven’t yet been buried under a decade of them.
    • Look for range, not agreement. A list that’s all one lab’s collaborators reads as narrow; a mix of institutions and countries reads as a paper confident enough to survive genuine scrutiny.

    For each name, give a one-line reason they’re a good fit and their institutional email and affiliation — most submission forms ask for exactly this, and a name with no justification attached is easy for an editor to skip past.

    If you’re unsure what actually makes someone a strong reviewer rather than just a plausible name, University English Hub’s video on how people become peer reviewers is a useful five minutes — it covers the qualifications editors actually look for, which is the same bar your nominees need to clear.

    Find your journal’s actual policy — don’t guess

    What we won’t do here is tell you how many reviewers to suggest, whether it’s mandatory, or whether your target journal lets you also name reviewers you’d prefer to avoid — because that genuinely varies by journal and publisher, and the rules change. The only reliable source is the journal’s own current instructions:

    1. The “Instructions for Authors” / “Guide for Authors” page — search that page specifically for “suggest reviewers” or “recommend reviewers,” since it’s often a subsection buried inside a longer submission-checklist page rather than its own heading.
    2. The submission portal itself, once you start the upload. Many systems only reveal the suggested-reviewer fields — and any limits on how many names, or whether excluded reviewers are allowed — at that stage, not on the public instructions page.

    If either is unclear, the editorial office will answer a direct email faster than you’d expect. It’s a normal question, not an unusual one.

    If you want the wider context — why peer review works the way it does, and why editors still lean on it despite its flaws — University English Hub’s short history of peer review is worth the four minutes; it’s the background that makes the suggested-reviewers box make sense as more than paperwork.

    What happens after they say yes

    A well-chosen reviewer list tends to produce sharper, more specific comments — which is good for the paper, but it does mean you’ll have real, detailed points to answer rather than a generic “revise and resubmit.” Before any of this, though, the manuscript itself needs to be clean enough that a reviewer’s first read is about the science, not the English — that’s the gap Level 3 editing closes before submission. And once the reports do come back, drafting a point-by-point reply that reads as collaborative rather than defensive is its own skill; that’s what response-to-reviewers editing is for, if you’d rather not write it entirely alone.

    We go through the whole submission checklist, including how editors actually use a suggested-reviewer list, in Chapter 8, “What Must You Know About Journal Peer Reviewers?” of our book on fixing your academic English and publishing faster.

    And if this is the kind of small, easy-to-miss submission detail you’d rather have land in your inbox before you’re rushing a deadline, this was one of fifteen writing tips — get our writing and publication emails here.

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  • Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? How to Tell, and What to Write

    A conflict of interest isn’t proof you did something wrong. It’s anything that could make a reasonable reader wonder whether your results were shaped by something other than the data — funding, employment, a patent, a personal relationship. The rule of thumb worth repeating to a labmate: if you’d feel awkward explaining it to a reviewer, declare it. Declaring it costs you a sentence. Not declaring it, and having someone else spot it later, costs a lot more.

    What actually counts as a conflict of interest

    The clearest definition we’ve seen, and the one we use in Writing Tip 8, is this: a conflict of interest exists when the motivation of one of your roles infringes on the duties of another. A doctor who receives funding from a pharmaceutical company and then studies that company’s drug has two roles pulling in the same direction — clinician and paid consultant — and readers need to know that before they weigh the conclusions.

    In practice, the categories that come up again and again in the papers we edit are:

    • Funding. A grant, consultancy fee, or in-kind support from a company whose product or interests the paper touches on.
    • Employment. Yours, or a close family member’s, at an organisation with a stake in the result.
    • Intellectual property. A patent or pending patent connected to the method or material you’re reporting on.
    • Roles that overlap. Sitting on an editorial board, advisory panel, or review committee connected to the submission.
    • Personal relationships. A close collaborator, former student, or family member among the authors or reviewers.

    None of these mean the research is compromised. They mean a reader deserves the chance to judge that for themselves — which is the entire point of the disclosure. As the tip puts it, a conflict of interest is “the potential for misconduct: a place where extra transparency can help build trust.”

    The test: would it look odd if it came out later?

    Researchers usually don’t struggle with the obvious cases — nobody forgets to mention that a pharmaceutical company funded a drug trial. Where it gets murky is the smaller stuff: a free sample from the manufacturer, a co-author who reviewed your grant application last year, a spouse who works for a competing lab. The test that cuts through this is simple: imagine a peer reviewer finding out about it independently, after the paper is published. If that would look bad, or even just surprising, it belongs in the disclosure — not because you did anything wrong, but because you didn’t get to decide that on the reader’s behalf.

    This is also why editors and reviewers themselves have to manage conflicts of interest, not just authors. If you want to see how a journal’s peer-review process handles this from the other side, it’s worth watching alongside this post.

    Find your journal’s actual policy — don’t guess

    Here’s where we won’t tell you what to write, because it genuinely depends on where you’re submitting. Disclosure requirements vary by journal, publisher, and field, and they change — a journal that accepted a one-line “the authors declare no conflict of interest” two years ago may now require a completed disclosure form for every author. The only reliable source is the journal’s own current instructions.

    Two places to check before you write a word of the section:

    1. The “Instructions for Authors” page on the journal’s own website — search for “conflict of interest” or “competing interests” specifically, since it’s often buried under a different heading than you’d expect.
    2. The submission portal itself. Many journals now require the disclosure as a structured form during upload (sometimes a standard uniform form used across a group of journals) rather than as free text in the manuscript, and you won’t see that requirement until you start the submission.

    If the policy isn’t clear from either, email the editorial office and ask before you submit — it’s a normal question and far better than guessing.

    What the section actually looks like

    Whatever the journal’s format, the disclosure itself is usually short. Two real shapes it takes:

    “The authors declare no conflict of interest.”

    “This work was supported by a research grant from [Company]. [Author] has received consulting fees from [Company] unrelated to this study. The funder had no role in the design, analysis, or interpretation of the data.”

    Notice the second example does two things: it names the relationship precisely, and it states — where true — that the funder had no editorial influence over the result. That second sentence is doing real work. It’s the difference between a disclosure that reassures a reader and one that just raises more questions.

    Getting the phrasing exact matters more here than almost anywhere else in a manuscript, because vague wording in a COI statement reads as evasive even when nothing is being hidden. If you want a second pair of eyes on the whole submission package before it goes out — disclosure section included — that’s the kind of detail a full publication-quality edit is built to catch.

    We go through disclosure statements, along with the rest of the submission checklist, in more depth in the peer review chapter of our book on fixing your academic English and publishing faster.

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  • American vs British English: which one should your paper use?

    Check your target journal’s Author Guidelines for which English variant it wants, and then use only that one, all the way through. That’s the whole rule. Most of the anxiety around “colour or color?” disappears the moment you realise it isn’t really a language question — it’s an instructions-for-authors question.

    We see the mixed version a lot: a manuscript that says “analyse” in the Methods and “analyze” in the Discussion, or “the results are shown in the table below” next to “the results are summarised in Table 3.” No reviewer is going to reject a paper purely for this. But it reads as sloppy, and sloppy is exactly the impression you don’t want a reviewer forming before they’ve even reached your data.

    American and British aren’t the only two, but they’re the two that matter for spelling

    English is genuinely a family of standard varieties, not one system with a few typos in it. Australian and Canadian English each blend American and British conventions in their own way — Canadian English, for instance, tends to keep British spellings like “colour” and “centre” but American terms like “apartment” and “gas.” For journal writing, though, only two variants are actually codified enough for a copyeditor to check against: American English and British English. That’s the choice you’re really making.

    The differences that actually turn up in manuscripts fall into a few small, memorisable buckets:

    • -ize / -ise: “characterize” (US) vs. “characterise” (UK) — though note British usage itself is split, and “-ize” is acceptable in UK English too (it’s the Oxford spelling).
    • -or / -our: “color,” “behavior” (US) vs. “colour,” “behaviour” (UK).
    • -er / -re: “center,” “liter” (US) vs. “centre,” “litre” (UK).
    • -og / -ogue: “analog,” “catalog” (US) vs. “analogue,” “catalogue” (UK).
    • Single vs. double consonant: “traveled” (US) vs. “travelled” (UK).
    • Collective nouns: “the team is” (US, singular) vs. “the team are” (UK, plural is common) — this one has nothing to do with spelling and everything to do with grammar, which is why spell-check won’t catch it.

    How to actually find out which one your journal wants

    Go to the journal’s own “Instructions for Authors” or “Author Guidelines” page — not a summary of it, not what a labmate remembers, the current version on the journal’s site, because these do change. Search that page for the word “English.” Most journals say something close to one of these:

    “Authors should use either US English or UK English, but not a mixture of the two.”

    That’s the instruction to look for. If you find it, you’re done — pick one and hold the line for the whole manuscript, including the abstract, figure captions, and supplementary files people tend to forget about.

    If the guidelines say nothing at all about spelling — which happens more than you’d think — American English is the safer default. It’s what the majority of international journals, indexing databases, and reference managers are built around, so when in doubt, that’s the one to reach for.

    One more real-world wrinkle: UK-based publishers and journals affiliated with UK institutions or societies usually do prefer UK spelling, even when their guidelines don’t spell it out. Same logic applies to Australian and Canadian journals and their own regional conventions. If you’re submitting somewhere with an obvious national affiliation, that’s a useful tiebreaker.

    There’s a short video that walks through exactly how to locate and read a journal’s Instructions for Authors, if you’d rather watch someone do it than read about it.

    Checking your own draft once you’ve decided

    Your word processor’s spell-checker only knows the dictionary it’s set to, so the fastest first pass is making sure the whole document — not just the section you’re typing in right now — is set to the same English variant. In Word, that’s Review → Language → Set Proofing Language, applied to the entire manuscript, not paragraph by paragraph.

    After that, spell-check will flag most spelling inconsistencies, but it won’t catch grammar differences like “the data is” vs. “the data are,” or “the team is planning” vs. “the team are planning.” Those need an actual read-through, and they’re exactly the kind of thing a second pair of eyes catches faster than the person who wrote the sentence and already knows what they meant.

    If picking the target journal in the first place is the part you’re stuck on — spelling variant included, since it flows from that choice — there’s a chapter on selecting a target journal in Uni-edit’s compiled guide to fixing your academic English and publishing faster that goes through it in more depth.

    And if you’d rather not proofread the whole manuscript for consistency yourself, that’s a standard part of what a full English edit checks — variant consistency included, alongside grammar, structure, and phrasing.

    The one-line version to remember: check the journal’s Author Guidelines for its English preference, and if it doesn’t say, use American English and stay consistent throughout.

    If you want more of these sent to you as you write, Uni-edit’s writing and publication emails cover one practical point like this at a time.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

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