Why Would You Get a Friendly Review of Your Work? Or... The Importance of Feedback in Academic Research

We've all been there, sitting there, thinking about it. The journal article that you’ve slogged over for months, maybe years. The sweat and tears that you shed to collect and analyse your data. The hard work and discipline it took to focus on sitting down and writing when you had a million other things you should have been working on. The persistence and resilience you showed in overcoming frustrations with technology/collaboration/analysis.

Now, after all that, you have a pretty good version of your manuscript, you are exhausted and just want to get it off your desk; submit the darned thing and start the reviewing process. Let the reviewers do their worst.

And then some other academic comes along and tells you to get a friendly review before you submit it. Rationally you know that it might be worthwhile and you’ve heard that the best journals recommend it, but it hurts to have to wait even longer. You wonder…

Should I get a friendly review before submitting for review at a journal?

I get it. I understand. I've submitted manuscripts to journals without getting an independent opinion. But it never works out as well as those situations where I've been able to get a friendly review BEFORE submitting. In this blog, I'll go through the advantages and disadvantages of having a friendly review of your manuscript and give some advice for how to deal with the potential downsides.

What is a Friendly Review?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of it all, let’s first define what we mean by “friendly review”. In the most general sense, a friendly review is proactively getting feedback on your work before submitting it to a journal. It might come from presenting at a conference, or an in-house seminar, or from (usually senior) colleagues reading your manuscript before you submit it to a journal. These days, it might even come from The Friendly Reviewer (click here to learn more).

Each form of friendly review has its uses - conferences and seminars can give you ideas for new or further analysis of your data (but obviously cannot provide information on the written document), colleagues can give you the benefit of their expertise (but it obviously depends on who you know and whether they have the time and experience to help), and The Friendly Reviewer can provide you with insight and recommendations (but obviously comes with a small financial cost).

In each form, though, you are getting feedback on your work so that you can address core issues that the journal’s reviewers might raise.

What are the Advantages of Getting a Friendly Review?

So, why would you bother proactively searching for feedback, particularly after you’ve already worked so hard to pull the manuscript together in the first place? The short answer is that, when you do submit it to a journal, you’re more likely to get a positive decision and incisive feedback from reviewers. But that short answer doesn’t contain any evidence, so let’s pull it apart and try and understand when and why friendly reviews can be useful.

1. Identify the common, big issues that reviewers are likely to pick up on

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of a friendly review is being able to see the comments that the reviewers are likely to have picked up on, had you submitted your draft. Assuming that your friendly reviewer has experience reviewing articles for journals similar to your target journal, this can be very enlightening. Often you will have been working on the research that underpins a manuscript for months or years. It becomes a part of you and who you are. You know that your work has weaknesses, every piece of research does, but because of the connection between you and the research, those weaknesses feel like baggage. You can feel overwhelmed when you think perfectionistically about what you weren’t able to do in the research, you may become over-protective and defensive about the strengths of your work, or you may just not be able to see an alternative because of the siloed nature of our disciplines. An experienced friendly reviewer is coming at your work independently, without any baggage but with a breadth of knowledge - just as your journal reviewer would - and this allows them to spot strengths and weaknesses effectively.

2. Able to address these issues before reviewers see it so they can’t use those as reasons for rejection

Of course, for a journal reviewer, spotting the strengths and weaknesses is the main task, and this is what they base their recommendation to the Editor upon. If the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, or if they appear to be so large that it would be difficult to address them in one or two revisions, then the journal reviewer is likely to recommend that the Editor reject your manuscript. Therefore, having a friendly reviewer read through your work and highlight these weaknesses is incredibly useful - you can now use the opportunity to rectify the balance between strengths and weaknesses BEFORE the journal reviewer makes the recommendation.

Depending upon their availability and experience, your friendly reviewer may provide some suggestions for dealing with the issues that they identify within your manuscript. Even if they don’t, you can search for ways for addressing them, just as you would if you had received the notification from journal reviewers. But importantly, because you now know what a journal reviewer might be concerned with, you can address them beforehand and minimise their impact.

For example, there may be some weaknesses in your draft that cannot be changed as they are built into the research design. If a journal reviewer came across these issues, they would likely reject the manuscript because the weaknesses are “fatal flaws”… but because your friendly reviewer highlighted them as potential issues, you can adapt your arguments and/or justify the design choices more effectively. While this may not be able to solve your fundamental problem, it will provide more context and logical reasoning for your design choices, shifting the journal reviewer’s thinking away from an immediate rejection recommendation.

Or, there may be some weaknesses that can be addressed by conducting further analyses or collecting another small amount of data. These are likely to be substantive concerns that would heavily orient a journal reviewer towards a rejection decision. But, when you know that these concerns exist, because your friendly reviewer highlighted the issue, you can run the analyses or collect the data before submitting; thereby nullifying the potential rejection.

Of course, even if you get multiple friendly reviews before submitting, the journal reviewers will be looking at your manuscript through their own unique perspectives and therefore will undoubtedly come up with other issues and concerns. No manuscript is perfect; no manuscript will ever completely satisfy every scholar. But that’s okay. If you are able to address the “big” concerns, then you are more likely to rebalance the ratio of strengths to weaknesses in the former’s favour; and if you are able to address “common” concerns, then you are more likely to not only redress any imbalance but also get more specific (and thus, more useful) feedback based on the unique nuances of your research. Nobody can guarantee a favorable publication decision, but addressing issues raised by a friendly reviewer will definitely improve both your manuscript and the reviewing process.

3. Gives you some time and space to come back and look at the paper more objectively to engage in more effective macro- and micro-editing

We tend to become quite insular while working on a manuscript and it can be hard to be objective. We know what we are trying to get across, and we read our work with that prior knowledge in mind, so it can be hard to see what is missing, what doesn’t make sense, or what needs further justification. Moreover, when we read our work back to ourselves, we read it knowing our own writing style and so we add in (or remove) pauses and emphases, regardless of the actual grammatical structure. A friendly reviewer doesn’t have that prior content or grammatical knowledge, so they can identify when an argument is missing a logical step, or when a sentence is too long, or a paragraph contains too many messages (or when a writing tic such as using too many parentheses occurs…).

While these issues are likely to not be viewed as “fatal flaws” by journal reviewers, they can soon add up. And they can be extremely problematic if it means that the reviewer can’t understand the reasoning behind your research question or hypothesis development. As such, it’s always useful to have fresh critical eyes read your work for understanding.

In addition, the time it takes for your friendly reviewer to go through your work can help give you your back some of your own space to look at the work more impartially. If your friendly reviewer is a senior colleague, they may be extremely busy and it may take a month or two for them to get back to you; but even a week’s turnaround can give you enough time to gain extra clarity and objectivity. This will help immensely as you edit your words, sentences, paragraphs and structural flow of the argument.

What are the Disadvantages of Getting a Friendly Review?

There are obviously lots of good reasons for getting a friendly review. But if it was that easy, everybody would always get a friendly review and you wouldn’t be asking the question in the first place. So what are the disadvantages that sit alongside these advantages? And how can you deal with them?

1. Identify the common issues that reviewers are likely to pick up on… which plays into perfectionism and never actually submitting your work to a journal

The downside to having somebody point out the strengths and weaknesses of your manuscript is that you may succumb to a common bias in academia - perfectionism. Because we are trained to be critical, we often become overly critical of our own work. When presented with feedback, many of us skip straight over the strengths and focus instead on the biggest weaknesses. This can lead to despair, dejection and ultimately denying yourself the opportunity of submitting your work. After all, it’s easier to either give up on the paper or to keep trying to make it perfect, than it is to put it into the reviewing process where it might be rejected.

How to deal with it?

If you have perfectionistic tendencies then the best approach is to set deadlines for yourself before and after your friendly review. For example, you could find a conference that you want to go to and plan your revision process around that. Identify your friendly reviewer and agree to send your manuscript to them 2 months before the conference submission date. Then, when you get their feedback, give yourself 1 month to tackle the most substantive issues, 2 weeks for moderate issues, and 2 weeks for smaller issues, micro-editing and proof-reading. After submitting to the conference, you can then give yourself a few weeks off before doing a final read through and submitting it to a journal. By creating built-in deadlines, you sidestep the distress and procrastination that is so common in perfectionism, allowing you to gain the advantages of the friendly review without the disadvantages.

2. Able to address these issues… but you need to find time and energy to address them and you have to keep working on a paper you thought was finished

Perhaps the most common reason that I have heard for not getting a friendly review is the time it will take to address any highlighted issues. Some people just want the paper off their desks, regardless of whether it can be improved or not and regardless of whether it will be rejected or not. And I agree that it is hard to keep working on a paper that you thought was complete.

How to deal with it?

There is no easy answer here - if you want the benefit of a friendly review then you need to put the time and effort into improving the manuscript. In other words, there is no behavioural hack you can use to make it easier. Instead, you need to change your thinking to one where the publication process is a set of steps rather than a race with a finishing line. Each step brings you closer to the top, but it is an ongoing process with no clear endpoint (even when you submit to the journal you still need to go through multiple rounds of revision). Taking this approach is more about growth and improvement than about demonstrating performance; and therefore it can be hard to maintain when you have promotion criteria and appraisals bearing down on you. In the long-term, though, you will benefit from changing your perspective as it allows you to both improve your manuscript and to learn more about what reviewers are looking for.

3. Gives you some time and space while the friendly reviewer reads the work…but finding a friendly reviewer can be difficult

Finally, while it can be nice to have some time away from your manuscript to create distance and freshen your objectivity, this assumes that you have found a friendly reviewer to look at your work during that period. Not everybody has that opportunity however. An ideal friendly reviewer is one who is independent, experienced in reviewing for journals similar to your target journal, has enough time to read through your work carefully, and is developmental in their feedback and suggestions for improvement. It’s a long list and it’s the rare person who is lucky enough to have a person like that to hand every time they have a paper they want to submit!

How to deal with it?

If you are working in a department with a lot of junior colleagues, or you have a strong network of peers at your own level, you can create a peer reviewing system. Depending on the size of the network and workload constraints, you can either set up a buddy-system or a paper-workshop system. A buddy-system works by having one or two other people do friendly reviews on a submitted paper - for every paper that you review, you get to submit a paper yourself. The buddy groups can be static (you review/are reviewed by the same one or two people every time) or dynamic (people volunteer to review papers when they are submitted). The advantage is that workload is spread across the group, but it means that you may have limited expertise and limited learning. The paper-workshop system operates by having everybody read one person’s draft and then meet for an hour or so to discuss possible suggestions for improvement. People take it in turns to submit their own drafts. This approach leads to maximal learning but, of course, it is much more effortful and getting the timing right around submissions can be tricky.

Another alternative is to hire an independent consultant, akin to a proof-reader, but one focused specifically on improving the substantive content of your manuscript. The Friendly Reviewer has been an Associate Editor and sat on the Editorial Boards of many of the journals in our field and so has a great deal of experience in identifying common issues and ways of improving manuscripts. For more information, click here.

I think it was William Starbuck who advised that the reviewer was always right… even when you believe you are right, the way that you have written your manuscript obviously does not convey that meaning or is convincing enough. By accepting this tenet, and by addressing the concerns raised by the friendly reviewer, you are likely to dramatically improve your manuscript and minimise the substantive concerns that a journal reviewer can identify. Yes, it can be dispiriting, and yes, it will take more time and effort than simply submitting your earlier draft, but the advantages will generally outweigh the disadvantages. Should you have somebody review your work informally before submitting to a journal? If you want a greater likelihood of a positive decision and useful reviewer comments, then the answer is a resounding yes.