Speaker 1: Hello I'm Dr. Seth Jenny and today we are going to talk about the peer review process as well as some of the discrepancies in reviewers comments for peer review in academic publishing. So I have here Explorer open and these are all folders under a main folder called publications so these are all the different research projects, publications that I have submitted and been working on. And I want you to take a look at some of these file names, the folder names, and all the ones that end in reject. Yes, those are all publications that I have submitted and they were rejected and so turn it around make revisions sometimes not even make revisions submit to another journal and try to land it somewhere else and you can see I have it dated for the month the year and then the month going down through where there's different rejects several rejects in a row and then trying to land it somewhere else. So with that said I want to go through a specific publication to give you an example of that peer review process. All right so we are going to go into this paper we'll call it eSports Venues. You can see some of the early editions of this paper started back in November of 2016 and what you're seeing here are all of the different revisions that we've gone through as I've saved them as file dates and names as we worked on the paper several different authors on this paper but that gives you an idea of how many different revisions and drafts and days working on the paper. Going into submitting it to this journal here, here's the comments back from the editor. Brianna, as the associate editor, just shared your proposal with us. I'm afraid we can't send it out for review to the peer reviewers. This is from the editor to us simply because we published a similar article last year on eSports and so it was rejected from our first journal that we selected that thought it'd be a good fit and then we submitted to another journal. Now here is an example of a blinded peer-reviewed manuscript. Notice there's no title page. The lines are numbered to provide the reviewers the ability to say, hey, on page one, line six, you have a grammical error or a misspelling or, I don't, this is not a good citation or you need a citation for that sentence. So that's why the lines are numbered. So this is that APA style blinded manuscript no authors are listed and we're getting down to here where in APA we have the tables at the end and that's blinded APA All right, now let's get into that folder where all of those files are saved and here is the separate title page that gets submitted to the editor, but when it's sent out for peer review it does not get sent to the other reviewers so it's kept separate. All right now next I want to show you our initial response from the editors of this second journal we sent it to in the reviewer comments. So this was, I remember we were working on this November of 2016. Now we've submitted to the second journal. August 21st, 2017, eSports venues, a new business opportunities to a sport management journal. Typically you'll have different options, flat out reject, resubmit for review. that's sort of the second level which we got except with minor revisions and then fully accept which barely never happens first off unless it's a pretty low-level journal or you're just an amazing writer and researcher or you know the editor alright so here is the comments from the editor as you see below the reviewers were split on their decision, but both offered valuable insights to help improve your manuscript. That was the gist of the comment from the main editor. Now let's take a look at reviewer A. Declined submission, dun dun dun. This manuscript is not appropriate for this journal. Submission guidelines suggest only papers which make a strong contribution to the esports industry. So this reviewer did not like it. This is what you call a blind review. We do not know who wrote that. Reviewer B, a little bit nicer, resubmit for review. So thought it had potential, make some revisions, and I'd like to take a look at it again. That's what reviewer B says. you know it's this is not just a uh... general comments uh... very specific comments as well so this reviewer sort of generally talks about the paper in the purpose of the study uh... we can see they read it well uh... give recommendations about the literature review better justification for the study and then we get into what we just showed you line forty eight new venues They so they want to specific things to be addressed. Line 55, specific things need to be addressed. Line 116. And so here are all specific recommendations. And so as an author, we say, you know what? We know that if we make these revisions, it's going to be sent back to the same reviewers. We're pretty sure that we cannot sway the opinion of reviewer A because he's already declined it. So what do we do? Well, we sent an email to the editor and said, hey, thanks so much. We feel this is valuable. But we feel like if we send it back, the reviewer A is never going to like it anyway. So let's see what the editor said to that. Polarizing views can be tough to reconcile in the review process. The editorial staff does not share the same view of the piece as reviewer one. So essentially what this editor says is to send it back and we'd like you to revise and resubmit. And we can see here that they did not agree on that. So, we said, great, excellent, we're going to submit it back, make the revisions, okay? So, here's the lovely things that we get to do then. We take all those comments, revision comments, make a really anal-looking chart, editor. Here's what the editor said that he wanted done on the paper. this on the right column are all the things that we did to change the manuscript to address any of those comments. Reviewer A, here's the things that he said of all the things or she said that they didn't like about the paper. Here's the things that we did to change the manuscript and then we did so anytime you're doing a review revise and resubmit you've got to be very clear on what you need to fix based upon the reviewer comments and editor comments and then what you did to fix it. So this is just one way to do that and so we go through line by line section by section to talk about on the left side what the reviewer said and on the right side what we did. So line 74 in the realm and the sporting realm eSports appear events appear to carry a major financial impact need to show the specific examples so we have we added specific citations to address that concern for that reviewer and all the way down all right so that's what we send back with the revisions close that all right now we're going back to sending it back after it was sent back we're on the September 14th now going back up checking on it and finally go back into here Then, eventually, we did get it accepted, and then I have to work with the copyright editor to make corrections on the finalized version of it. So I had to go through the copyright editor, and you can see I inserted a comment here. The copyright editor had Esports Ventures, V-E-N-T-U-E-S, so that was something I caught where I inserted a comment in the PDF and told the copyright editor, hey, we need to change it to Venues, not Ventures. And so after things are reviewed and they accept that, which it may be more than one round of revisions, you also have to work with the copyright editor to make sure that they put it in to the same format and they didn't lose anything. So here was another revision that I caught that we needed to have fixed. Here's another one somehow maybe I probably misspelled it in the original instead of and so here we I caught that hey we we had a misspelling in this word can we change that before it gets published. And so here we can see my academia.edu site and second one down eSports venues a new sport business opportunity this is that publication and we can see that it's received 220 views it's top 2% on academia.edu for publications and so that there's obviously interest in this publication and their readers I'm assuming or at least the topic is of interest for that. Finally I just want to show you here's another sample reject type of feedback from a different publication. This particular reviewer spent six pages which is an amazing amount of time really appreciate the detailed type of feedback but you can see how detailed giving specific reference citations for revisions going through each detailed section of the paper from the lit review to the theoretical underpinning regarding the value, the discussion section, so yeah there's six pages and here's recommended for future citations for that and the funny thing is is they recommended one of my publications for revisions. So that is some of the review process for academic peer review and some of the discrepancies you might come across in that the subjective process of which is peer review.