The Pros and Cons of Reviewing Academic and Scientific Writing
If you are considering reviewing academic or scientific writing, it is wise to reflect both seriously and realistically on the full implications of the tasks you will be performing. Whatever good might come of doing either pre-publication or post-publication reviews will not become a reality if you do not complete the work you promised to do or choose to perform that work shabbily or without a scholarly conscience. Considering the pros and cons or perhaps the investments and returns of reviewing might therefore be helpful.
• Time is a major concern because reviewing scholarship thoroughly and thoughtfully will take more time than most academics and scientists expect when they first begin doing reviews. For pre-publication reviews, time will be an especially sensitive issue, and being tardy with your work and not meeting the deadline you agreed to will hinder the publication process. Consuming large portions of your time completing reviews may be a pro or a con depending on whether you feel you have more important things to do with your time.
• Access to the most recent research before it is published and the acquisition of new publications without charge are among the benefits of pre- and post-publication reviewing, and few would argue that these are anything but pros. However, taking on reviewing jobs that do not match your specialisation is, in most cases, neither fair to the authors nor a productive use of your time. Choosing to review unpublished writing in order to prevent the research of competitors from being published is unethical. Keep in mind that a bird’s eye view of your field and offers of free books must be balanced against the seriousness of reviewing the writing of other scholars.
• Reviewing scholarly writing enables you to do a service for your academic or scientific community, one that will be rewarded with recognition and perhaps some of the benefits that can follow recognition. To be considered an expert in your field, however, you will need to behave as an expert would, reviewing the studies you report on thoroughly, thoughtfully and respectfully. If you do, reviewing may produce pros both personal and professional that easily outweigh the time and effort you invest.
• Reviewing can be a successful aspect of the path to a career in editing and publishing. Peer reviewers who do an excellent job for a journal will be offered new articles to review, and doing an excellent job for the editor time and again can lead to positions on editorial boards and even to a career as chief editor. This may sound more like a con than a pro to those who prefer to conduct research and teach students, but those who truly enjoy reviewing also tend to enjoy editing and publishing, so it is certainly a possibility worth a little exploration.
• Remembering as you read the work of your colleagues, often behind the mask of anonymity, that the object is to benefit knowledge as a whole by enabling the publication of sound and valuable research will help you stay on track. If you remind yourself that you are simply one member of an academic or scientific community that will have other reviewers to judge and therefore enable or hinder your research and writing, you will be better able to keep the human element front and centre as you review, and that is definitely a pro regardless of where your reviewing activities may take you.
Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.
Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.
If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.
