Yeah participant greetings and welcome to this final session of the webinar series on publishing agricultural development research in social science journals in social sciences um as you know these webinar series are co-organized by the cgi research program on policy institution and market the cgi standing panel on impact assessment and african women in agricultural research and development.
My name is michel umbochua I serve as the deputy director program at the african women in agricultural research and development this is award uh hosted at the world agroforestry center aircraft in nairobi kenya.
It’s really a great honor and pleasure for me to to share this webinar on writing and responding to referees reports this session will particularly focus on the specifics of the referee process and particularly on why and how to do good reviews how to respond to referees reports as you know many researchers um try to publish articles in good journals in social sciences but this process is often very lengthy or fairly complex because it entails different stages and one of these stages is actually responding appropriately to referees comments in such a way that one can maximize the chances of subsequent acceptation acceptance and publication and in this same process you may be called upon to review and write referee reports so how then do we write effectively and comprehensively these are some of the questions we are going to address um in today’s seminar I’m joining this panel discussion by our two key uh speakers for today these are cheryl dust and jv minus meenakshi let me introduce them to you I’ll start with cheryl cheryl dust is an associate professor and senior departmental lecturer in development economies at the department of international development university of oxford she is currently the editor of the journals in social sciences oxford development studies she had served on the on the editorial boards of the international journals in social sciences of agricultural sustainability feminist economics and the journals in social sciences of gender agriculture and food security she’s published widely in journals in social sciences in agricultural economics in development economics and development studies jv minaji is professor at the daily school of economics university of delhi the top ranked economic department in india she serves as an associate editor in the indian economic review she’s also a member of the editorial board of agricultural economics and the journals in social sciences of agribusiness in developing and emerging economics she is an agricultural economist and has published in top field journals in social sciences in the area of agriculture health and development economics she is also a member of the standing panel on impact assessment of the international science for development council so welcome cheril welcome mina and thank you for taking time to shed some light on these processes before we proceed a few logistical notes to our participants so please as the panelists will be speaking submit your question on the question window on the right side of the of your screens and we’ll be taking the questions as they come and when you ask a question please let us know your name where you are connecting from if possible you can indicate your organization let us know also to which speaker you like to address your question and um yeah we’ve been recording this webinar and the recording will be available on the pim website after this session so back to the speakers and I would like to invite sheri on her presentation on writing reviews after which we’ll be taking uh the first round of question so please feel free to start posting your question uh on the on the question window the right side of your screen cheryl over to you great thank you michelle so we’re gonna start by talking about writing reviews and so the first question is when you get invited to write a review by an editor should you agree should you say yes so the answer is yes you should agree if first of all you want to check and make sure that it’s from a reputable journals in social sciences so we talked about this quite a bit in the first session of this series but that certainly if it’s a journals in social sciences that you know and have heard of you should think about saying yes certainly if it’s a journals in social sciences that you hope to publish in um you ought to think about accepting the invitation one of my criterias for whether I should agree to review a paper is whether it’s something that I want to read anyways if this is the paper that’s in my field that it’s something that if it was published I would want to read then I often will say yes and agree to read and review it and you should say yes even if you’re a young scholar um even if even if you’re still a phd student you should feel comfortable saying yes and being willing to um to review a paper you might want to tell the editor to make sure that they know that you’re still a phd student but as an editor I get some of my best reviews from people who are currently phd students so that alone shouldn’t disqualify sometimes you should say no um if you get a paper and it’s completely outside your area of expertise and you don’t feel like you’re comfortable doing that um you should say no I will say that as an editor sometimes I look for different reviewers who have different pieces of the expertise I almost never find anybody as a reviewer who’s written exactly on that topic but I’ll often look for one reviewer who really knows the topic and one who knows the particular location um or or country setting that the paper is in um but if none of those um are relevant then you should be comfortable saying no and if you’re really not going to be able to provide the review in a timely manner then you should say no and not agree to do it um sometimes it’s worth checking in with the editor if you think you may have a conflict of interest and you’re not sure you can check in with the with the editor I often do this and will say things like um I know who this paper is written by and they’re a co-author of mine but I haven’t been involved in writing this particular paper and sometimes they’ll say fine go ahead and review it and sometimes they’ll say they want to find a different reviewer if you know you can’t do it in the allotted time but could do it if they gave you an extra week or two then it’s worth asking the editor about that but let me put in a plea as an editor please don’t ask for extra time and then simply not do it um if you’re not going to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time tell us no and we’ll come back to you for another um the next time the other way to think about this and the response I get often asked by particularly young scholars is really do I have to do this um I got asked to do this do I do I have to say yes and the first piece is that reviewing papers for journals in social sciences is part of the service that we all do for the profession um any of us who publish papers we expect that other people will review our work and so we’re obliged to review other papers so you you should be expecting that over the course of your career you will be doing these um and that you have you have an obligation in some sense to say yes not to everyone think about the criteria I just talked about but in general you do need to be doing reviews writing these reviews is a great experience and I think particularly for for young scholars to think it really helps you to think about how papers are put together and what are the strengths and weaknesses of different papers trying to think about what this person could do to improve their paper will really help you think about how your own papers are written and how they’re reviewed and I will say that just this weekend I reviewed another paper and in doing so in articulating what they needed to do better I figured out how to fix a paper that I was working on there are a little bit different topics it wasn’t that I was using their material but the way I had to think about it to write the review was helpful for me in my own work in thinking about writing reviews you want to write the kind of reviews that you would like to receive um which doesn’t mean we all want reviews that say this is the best paper ever we’ll take it um and that’s not what I mean but what I mean is papers reviews that are really constructive provide good helpful comments um and help the paper move from the level it’s at to the next level um you can be both positive and critical but but in a tone that’s constructive and helpful rather than something that’s really negative you should never say this is the worst paper I’ve ever read even if it is you want to think about how this is going to be received by the author who’s who’s written it and again if you decide you can’t do the review um responding promptly to the editor is really helpful so they can go on and find somebody else and if you have suggestions of alternative of reviewers I just read this other paper by somebody else I think they’d be a great reviewer for it that’s always really helpful for the editor um so when it comes to actually writing the review what is what do we actually need to do um there’s kind of four components to it one is that many of the journals in social sciences will ask you some very specific questions um and and you need to answer those sometimes there’ll be little text boxes in the online review that you need to fill in sometimes they’ll tell you what they want you to say in your review but it’s really helpful if you can answer those those specific kinds of questions then you have a set of comments to the author a set of comments to the editor and then you’re also making a recommendation to the editor so let’s start with thinking about the comments to the author this is doing when you’re writing a review so how should you think about structuring it start by stepping back and thinking about the big picture and write a couple of sentences that say what the paper aspires to do and what it actually does um it’s really helpful for the authors to see if what you think they’re aspiring to do is what they also thought they were aspiring to do um so what is it that you’re getting out of the paper thinking about what does it do well um what is the contribution that this paper is making to the literature so start with the positive then big picture comments um that express your concerns about the paper what what doesn’t work what makes you think that maybe this paper as it’s now written shouldn’t be published it could be things about how the paper is framed it could be about the methods or the empirical analysis or about the relevance of the paper to the journals in social sciences audience generally the editor will have done a first screening on it and won’t send you anything that’s really not a fit for the um for that particular journals in social sciences and then a useful way to proceed is to go section by section make a few broad comments on the sections so on the literature review on the conceptual framework um on the methods and data um are those sections effective and then detail any more minor comments that you might have um some hints into how to think about this one that’s really useful particularly if you’re like most of us you get it you say you’ll do it and then you put it away for a little while when you get it skim it make sure that the paper really is something that you’re comfortable reviewing even if you’re gonna put it down for a little while take a look at it and make sure that you’re going to be able and comfortable reviewing it if not get back to the editor right away it’s really frustrating as an editor to have somebody come back six weeks later and say you know I finally looked at this and I think somebody else would be better right you’ve just wasted six weeks of time and think about yourself on the other end of that as the author it can be really helpful to suggest some other literature maybe some other papers that you think that the this particular one ought to engage with sometimes another body of literature that would be relevant um it’s really nice if you’re going to do that to make a couple of suggestions and provide the references for it it’s really not appropriate to say that what they really need to do is read your own body of work and engage with everything you’ve ever written you can include one of your own papers if you think that would be helpful for them but this really isn’t a place to be promoting your own work it’s also useful to think about the fact that what you’re doing is you’re invited you to review based on who you are and what your expertise is you’ll then be asked to make a recommendation um again you can put some comments about it in the comments to the editor explaining your reasoning pay attention to what the different journals in social sciences what that journals in social sciences’s categories are there’s kind of a range of them and they have different journals in social sciences use different ones but it’s also important to remember that the editor is the one responsible for making the decision what you’re doing is making a recommendation and providing some guidance for the editor and they’re going to make that decision so you don’t have to worry too much about it it’s not it’s a responsibility to make a good recommendation but the editor is the one who makes the final decision finally this is just kind of a useful way to think about some of those different categories what kind of a decision you might make if there’s no potential for a substantial contribution or the methods really are not robust and you don’t see that they could be or if the data is not appropriate to answer the question we’ve all written papers where the data wasn’t as good as we would like but if really you can’t answer the question with the data then that’s clear that’s a clear straight out reject if you think that there’s some potential to make a substantial contribution but it’s not quite fully developed or adequately developed then there might be two different things that might need additional data analysis so they might need to go back to their data and re-run a number of a bunch of their analysis or they might need to really rework the or reframe the paper in order to make the points that they’re trying to make it make it much clearer in these cases the recommendation would be one of the recommendations on reject reject or revise and resubmit depending on how that journals in social sciences categorizes them if there’s a real clear potential um the literature it’s well written and well executed there may be something that needs to be reworked or reframed um then that might be a major revision if it just needs um minor edits or kind of clarification then that would be a minor revision um but again you’re going to make that recommendation and then you’re going to also explain and justify your recommendation in your comments to the editor finally after you’ve done all of that you’re likely to get if you’ve recommended that it be revised sometimes even when you recommended that it be rejected um you will get another version of the paper the revised version of the paper um if you have been the first a reviewer and you get a revision sent back to you as an editor I would ask you please if at all possible agree to review the revision and do it fairly quickly it’s difficult to find a reviewer to read your comments and try to figure out if the concerns you had initially have been met and it doesn’t always feel fair to the author so just as you as an author don’t like to have your paper sent to a new reviewer on the revision think about it from the other side and if at all possible review it again and and do it quickly when you get these one of the interesting things is to read the letters editor and the reports from the other if you try to give it to the same two two different journals in social sciences basically the same analysis that could be considered plagiarism.
Um but as so right if you’ve already read this paper published or something very similar to it you can you can flag it the the journals in social sciences offices typically have ways to check on plagiarism as well so um again you’re not responsible for reading everything I’ve now got a response from the journals in social sciences so just to set us up what i’d like to do is to take you through sort of the three main kinds of responses that we get the first is a reject uh or you might get a revise and resubmit or you’ll get an accept the accept is pretty unlikely it’s unlikely that from the get go it’s going to be accepted without but just the editor reviewing it so the first category let’s get that out of the way which is the test reject or reject after review I’ve been talking to some editors across the board and just to give you a sense of numbers the desk reject rates vary from 30 to 50 percent depending on what journals in social sciences you look like you look at there’s also rejection after review which ranges from 40 to 55 percent so I’ll speak briefly about what to do if you get one of these kinds of projects and then I’ll walk you through a little bit of what you might do if you get a major revise and resubmit and often this happens over multiple rounds and at this stage according to some of the editors that I’ve spoken to say 10 to 15 actually will come back with a major revision of those then it’s unlikely that the paper will get rejected although it does happen it’s not a guarantee but after you’ve got to revise and resubmit the chances of getting published actually get much higher if you’re one of these people who’s lucky enough just to get a minor revision that usually means that the editor is likely to accept it so that’s also a case that I do not intend to cover in the next in the next few minutes so let’s turn to the next slide um could I request you to so let’s look at the death reject cases so the test reject simply means that the editor is not happy and has decided that this is not a good fit for the journals in social sciences and this might happen either because the topic itself is not a good fit for the journals in social sciences audience or it’s the editor’s assessment that the paper has weaknesses or that it does not constitute a significant contribution to the literature now one useful tip to take away is that you automatic so the reaction should not be okay so I tried here and didn’t get through let me just get on to the website of another journals in social sciences and go ahead and submit submit it there that’s usually not a good idea it’s important to sort of look at the editor’s letter and say why was it I thought this was a good journals in social sciences to submit my paper to so why did the editors say that this was not a good fit for the journals in social sciences you might even ask yourself I saw a very similar paper published there two years ago three years ago and my tape was quite similar to that why is it that the editor thinks now suddenly that my paper is uh is not a good fit for the journals in social sciences so there are many reasons for that maybe first that you didn’t sell the paper properly so you need to go back and rewrite the introduction but also remember that journals in social sciences editors change over time journals in social sciences priorities change over time and so it’s possible that something that the journals in social sciences was very interested in two years ago or three years ago is not of such great interest uh to go to the current editor so that can also happen but the main reason I think is simply they mean what they say that it’s not a good fit and that maybe you need to go back and do some homework on why it wasn’t there was this mismatch if it happens then what we get is an assessment that this was not a significant contribution to the literature then that’s also something we should be thinking about before deciding whether I should just send it same paper lower down or whether I should whether I should actually take those comments seriously on board so let’s say in fact cheryl could remove the next slide so let’s say it turns out that the paper was in fact sent out for review and it comes back and it comes back with a reject after review and the first instinct of all of us is to get very defensive to sort of say they didn’t really understand the paper they didn’t spend the time on the paper to actually look at it in in great detail so I think the first thing to remind ourselves is just to take a deep breath and not get defensive about what the referees are saying because remember that the editors are doing what’s best for the journals in social sciences and they want to publish good papers and if the paper goes out to three referees and none of them is particularly enthusiastic or only one person has a lukewarm response it’s unlikely that three people haven’t found the time to read through it carefully so you do need to sort of think about why this happened and go back to the drawing board as necessary but once again my advice would be that before we decide to send it out to yet another journals in social sciences it’s important that we go through the same process of selecting a journals in social sciences and if it’s already been six months since you’ve heard and you have a promotion coming up where publication numbers matter this is something that you might want to factor in in a decision about where to where to send it next but once again it’s not a good idea to submit the paper in the same form as we as you first sent it out to just yet another journals in social sciences for several reasons some of which we covered in previous uh previous sessions uh for instance there’s a very good chance that it will go back to the same same referee and if the even if the referee goes back to the editor saying hey uh actually I reviewed this for another journals in social sciences so and usually most reviewers will say that so that the editor knows that this is the second time this paper is hitting the desk of a particular referee but the reviewer if the reviewer says but I noticed that you know these detailed comments that I that I made none of them have been taken on board then that’s actually not a good signal uh to be sending out that somebody has spent the time and effort to give you feedback and just because it’s a reject you decide you ask you to review them right yeah we should be able to do take as many as you know if you feel that you can get to it you’ve been given three weeks you can turn it around in three weeks I personally learn quite a bit just by reviewing these papers because that’s the kind of stuff that I have I’m compelled to read line by line if I pick up a journals in social sciences I’ll often skim through it try and get a sense of you know what what the authors are trying to say um I think it’s it’s it’s useful I find refereeing to be extremely useful so if your time permits it I’m not saying you you suspend all the other activities but time permitting I think it’s a good thing to say yes enter to a decent job but sometimes you know for instance I get phd dissertations to review and I know that I have two already that I haven’t looked at don’t take them on and say that I’m you know or tell them I can do this after such and such date but not before it’s it’s yeah there’s no number that I can definitely know yeah and probably in the same line of thoughts there is a question here uh I believe uh the the participant is asking when you are getting a revised and probably submit but the time that is given for for the review is short uh do you have any option to to ask for more time this is from danube gong yeah is there a possibility to ask for more time to review the paper so um you know I’ve certainly done that but you know let’s say we’ve been asked to turn it around in a month um you might say look I’ll do it in six weeks I can’t do it for x y and z reasons but it should not be the case that they ask you to do it in a month and you tell them okay I’ll get back to you in 10 months I mean that so so yes there’s some wiggle room I think most editors are sympathetic and appreciate the fact that you need a little bit more time but we need to be reasonable I’ve done that myself uh december is sort of peak teaching time grading time there’s no way that I can get to things in december so yeah some of the journals in social sciences are really pushing those revise secondly do you have to cite them all or can you write a cover letter to the editor to explain this so if it does happen I would again recommend the path of least resistance uh if it is a case of citing a couple of you know additional citations in the literary view and I’m assuming that you know this was sort of egregious citation that they’re asking you to do it’s not that you missed uh reviewing this work in your own interview so so this is just some referee trying to say that you must cite their paper um if it’s if it’s easy enough to sort of incorporate into the list if you do so uh you don’t have to spend a great deal of time on on that paper but if it is if it’s a situation where you feel that this is a completely unrelated this is something to flag for the editor to say that you know I i don’t see that these are relevant and again make sure that you know we’ve read the paper so that we can say we look through this paper here’s why we don’t think it’s relevant they’re talking about a and I’m talking about b whatever it is the the important thing is for the for the editor and the referee to say that to realize that you thought about it and not just said hey you know that’s just completely outside I don’t know what I’m trying to look at so I don’t want to take it it’s at the same time if it’s you know if it’s a relatively minor thing to incorporate there’s no harm into it so if it’s relevant yeah cherie do you want to add to this I think that’s good yeah we are almost getting to the end of of this sake of this uh session uh and and as we wrap up I would like to to turn to to you uh mina and cheryl again and ask you uh I believe the many early career scientists out there listening or they will be listening to the recordings what is your message of encouragement to them as they initiate or proceed in their journey into the publication process.
Um I think it’s good practice to present your work in different forum before you submit to a journals in social sciences because a lot of the rough edges get sort of smoothed out by presenting your work to your peers to present your paper at conferences it also establishes you as somebody who’s working in this area that’s not how we um that’s not how our work gets better our work gets better when we talk about it share it get comments on it that’s as true for me at my career stage as it is for early career researchers I never submit a paper to a journals in social sciences without having several other people read it first and often I’ve presented it numerous times as well but but people to actually read that draft if you’re struggling with your english then have somebody read it and do a proofreading of it the journals in social sciences generally won’t make a decision not to publish something because your english isn’t good but if it’s hard to read
Thank you to all our participants for joining us again today and all your great questions um a big thank you to all our organizers the cgi research program on policies institutions and markets the cgi standing panel on impact assessment and award all our contributors I want to think about our journals in social sciences editors who joined us for the second webinars the moderators and all the resource people who have also worked closely uh together to make this happen again today so thank you very much uh for your participation and we hope to see you again in probably another webinar series thank you all.
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