Being critical and constructive: a guide to peer reviewing for librarians

As a peer reviewer for a journal, you have an important role to play. You help the editor sift through the myriad of submissions, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of manuscripts and thereby helping make decisions about which works are important and rigorous enough to be shared with our community of library researchers and practitioners. As in most fields of study, however, librarians usually do not receive formal training in how to review a manuscript. Instead, we may learn how to be a peer reviewer by receiving reviews of our own manuscripts that we have submitted to journals or by picking up general tips and tricks gleaned from our intimate understanding of the scholarly publishing process. Not surprisingly, therefore, peer-reviewing skills are unevenly distributed across librarians, and even experienced peer reviewers may persist in wondering whether they are successfully accomplishing this task.