Words of Advice: How to be a good peer reviewer of scientific manuscripts

Peer review is an integral part of the publication process for all academics in the molecular life sciences and beyond. You may groan about being invited to review as academic life is so busy – there are grant proposals to write, students to supervise, conferences to attend, not to mention one's own manuscripts to write – but the inescapable truth is that reviewing your colleagues' work is a necessary part of the job description. Although nobody gets paid to do it, high‐quality peer review pays dividends by promoting data validity and reproducibility and ensuring a better standard of published research all round. From the individual researcher's perspective, having your ‘peers’ evaluate the merits and limitations of your work and suggest improvements helps you to see the bigger picture and maximise the significance of your findings for the target audience. On the flip side, a bad reviewer can end up being the stuff of nightmares. In this latest instalment of the Words of Advice series, I provide tips on being a good reviewer. Reviewing is a skill that needs to be honed with practise and experience and being an expert in your field does not automatically make you a good reviewer. So, from early on in your career, we suggest that you devote time to practising and perfecting this art, as refining your reviewer skills will also help you to improve your own papers.
Find the link to the full Words of Advice Article here: https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/febs.15705
Interested in seeing more of the Words of Advice series? Find more here: https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1742-4658.WordsofAdvice
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