On reviewing scientific manuscripts for scholarly journals

When somebody submits a manuscript to a journal, it will be sent to referees for peer review (of course, provided that the editor likes it in the first place!). The editor would normally ensure that your manuscript is being routed to some expert who's in the same field as yours, although sometimes it might not be necessarily the case.

I review papers for like 7 journals and the list is growing. At some point, 1 or 2 journals did send me some manuscripts which were outside my area of expertise. I had to decline because it would take me too long to keep abreast of the literature in other fields. But I find it sad that (1) journals do make that mistake of sending manuscripts to the wrong person, and worst that (2) some researchers rarely decline to review them. Often, the result, in this case, is that you get poorly reviewed manuscripts. I did encounter in the past reviewers who didn't really understand what was going on.

On the bright side, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, ad hoc referees are subjected to statistics. If a reviewer declines 3-4 papers without sending a genuine report, he'll be rejected by the system and his name won't appear on the referee database. Similarly, if a reviewer accepts blindly 4-5 papers, he's most likely to disappear from the referee database. In brief, there must be some balance and genuine review of a manuscript.

As a referee, if you genuinely review manuscripts and demonstrate that you really know your field, you get high scores from the system. And, you'll be invited to review other journals, in which you may have never published in.

A good guideline to review manuscripts can be found on the Small journal website. And, there's also lots of good advice on Google. The bottom line is that if you accept to review a paper, make sure that it's within your area of expertise and remember that you have a duty to do a good job!