Peer Reviewing in Applied Linguistics: Reviewers’ Perceptions

Abstract

Peer review is carried out in academic journal boards in somewhat different ways to serve the purposes of a particular journal. Through the peer review process, reviewers in academic journals scrutinize and deeply analyze the quality of academic works before the publication. As an ‘occluded’ genre (Swales, 1996), getting access to the content of peer reviews in journals is too difficult. To shed light on the process of peer review, we investigated the reviewers’ perceptions and understandings of peer review in Applied Linguistics journals published in Iran. To this end, we developed an open-ended questionnaire and sent out it to the editorial board reviewers of Iranian certified journals active in publishing on different aspects of applied linguistics. Sixteen reviewers participated in the study by filling in the questionnaire and returning it back. The collected data were analyzed through thematic qualitative data. The results of the study indicate that the reviewers are all active agents in reviewing the manuscript and consider both conceptual, methodological, and mechanics of writing. The implications and recommendations are discussed in light of the findings.