#EveryLittle Action Counts Week 7: Creating a Positive Academic Reviewing Culture
Referring to Christa Sathish’s recent Reflections on the completion of AMR’s Bridge Reviewer Program , this week is dedicated to creating positive academic reviewing culture.
The crisis in academic reviewing refers to various challenges within the peer-review process, such as reviewer disengagement due to heavy workloads and prioritising the quantity over quality of publications. The increasing volume of submissions requires more engaged reviewers who are willing to spend more time, time they do not have, on reviewing. This can affect the effectiveness and quality of our peer-review processes and ultimately lead to poor academic writing and theorizing and lower quality contributions.
Efforts are being made to address these issues through innovations in peer-review models, such as open peer review as well as through increased transparency, accountability, morality, and constructiveness in the peer-review process.
The AMR Bridge Reviewer Program is an excellent example of how collective and positive actions in academia can lead to holistic, constructive, and inclusive peer-reviewing. The program provides opportunities for ECRs and PGRs and includes those who may not have easy access to review to join the academic reviewing community.
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
– Theodore Levitt
Creating positive reviewing cultures in academia is everyone’s responsibility. That means taking actions, moving beyond a list of bullet points of what good reviewing is and start doing things. The following points are some key starters to initiate positive change in our reviewing processes in the longer term.
- Creating understanding through the unit of practice. These practices are intertwined and interconnected with theoretical material and socially constructed knowledge about reviewing within reviewing communities, the trainees, and the mentors.
- Learn from the practices of established senior reviewers’ past and present experiences and can relate this to developing our practices. Thus, we observe practices in space and time and our practices then are also observed by the mentor and our peers.
- Integrating junior academics who are willing and eager to learn how to review can reduce the pressure of surplus reviewing on senior academics and minimize the gap of detachment of academics from reviewing.
- Connect and transform knowledge into practice and vice versa. This creates a wealth of positivity in the learning process enables us to develop holistic, and constructive review competencies.
We would be very happy to learn about your own suggestions on how to create a positive academic reviewing culture.
Anne-Wil Harzing & Christa Sathish.
