Reviewing manuscripts for behavior‐analytic journals: A primer

Abstract

The peer‐review component of the editorial process is designed to facilitate quality control, legitimize scientific research, and self‐regulate scientific communities. Even though serving as a reviewer undoubtedly has direct and indirect benefits, the peer‐review system and the methods of teaching scholars to conduct reviews are nascent and relatively underdeveloped. This article describes the peer‐review process and provides recommendations for writing reviews for scientific journals. The recommendations were developed based on the expertise and preferences of editors in chief and associate editors for behavior‐analytic journals (Cengher & LeBlanc, in press), and they include honoring your responsibility, knowing your audience, being constructive and kind, and carefully evaluating the merits of the study or review. These guidelines may serve as a primer for scholars who want to conduct reviews for scientific journals in behavior analysis.

Editors' perspectives on the selection of reviewers and the quality of reviews

“…Future research should employ qualitative measures, such as focus groups (for a recent example of this approach, see St. Peter et al, 2023). Also, future research should inform the development of tutorials on writing reviews for scientific journals, which could be empirically validated (see Cengher & LeBlanc, 2024, for one such example).…”