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Tag: Peer review

  • 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.

    Want more of this kind of thing — one practical fix at a time — straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our writing and publication emails.

    Would a course help?

    We are weighing up four short courses: academic writing, writing with AI, AI in research, and presenting your work. None of them is built yet. Tell us which would be useful and what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist