Tips for Being an Excellent (and Helpful) Reviewer for Professional Journals (TH359)

Abstract

•Use key reviewing skills to provide constructive feedback to authors.•Include key elements in your reviews that provide effective and constructive feedback to editors.•Avoid common pitfalls and errors in conducting effective peer reviews. In order to advance the field of hospice and palliative care through journal publications, it is essential to have a community of peer reviewers who can evaluate a manuscript’s quality, novelty, and importance to the field. Peer reviewers form the backbone of the process by which innovation, new ideas, and research results are used to guide clinical practice and future research. The peer review process is particularly important in a relatively new field such as palliative care. However, researchers and clinicians receive little or no formal training in how to provide high-quality peer reviews for journal manuscripts. In this session, an interprofessional faculty will describe the review process from the perspective of new reviewers, an experienced reviewer, an editor of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (the AAHPM journal), and an author. Together, we will describe approaches to gain experience in reviewing, some of the challenges that new reviewers face, and strategies for overcoming those challenges. We also will describe the review process from the dual perspective of an editor and an author in order to define the features of a review that are most (and least) helpful. Participants will gain concrete, usable reviewing skills and an interprofessional perspective on how to do a high-quality, helpful review of a journal manuscript.