What I’ve learned from publishing peer-review

 I have a doctorate in the humanities from a Swedish university. My PhD thesis was therefore a monographs that did not go through the peer review process, other than the thesis defence which in itself can be viewed as a peer-review process on crack. After finishing my PhD I, however, started to try to publish in international journals. 

This process have been both exhausting, frustrating and challenging my ideas of writing. It has also helped me to evolve as a researcher in ways I did not think possible some years ago. Whilst I only have only published paper, I have several underway after several attempts to write peer-review which I totally lacked experience of.

The first thing that I have come to notice is that it often takes a long time to publish peer review. Periods for upto a year is not unheard of, nor particularly long. This aspect actually came as a surprise for me. A second aspect is also that journals differs in styles and what they expect from a paper. The old ”thesis”-style in writing is not always warranted with clear sections on methodology and theory. My main advice is therefore to not only select a journal that is relevant for the topic, but also to read their published articles before starting to write the final draft yourself. 

When you write peer-review, you thus give away part of your freedom. I actually quite often also sees memes that adress the difficulties of satisfying the reviewers. What I, however, have learned is that sometimes critique that might seem odds is sometimes warranted and significantly can improve your texts. Therefore, I also view it as a good way to learn more to actually adress the comments, rather than making the editor re-consider their decisions. All in all, writing peer-reviewed papers is the hardest thing I’ve done academically, but also the most rewarding. 

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