Humans are talented with the ability to create good pieces of work. At the same time, humans are gifted with the capabilities to co-operate, combine, compile and synthesize ideas. In the first step, every creative work, be it art, be it science, is created in isolation, maybe by only one individual. In this blog, I am giving particular emphasis to scientific literature, a written piece of work, precisely a research article. A scientist carries out research work, first with his own group comprising of a few scientists/researchers. The work is further commented by her/his individual group members, or colleagues called the internal peer review. Most of the times, internal peers are very critical, so that the quality of work improves drastically. Such kind of internal peer-reviewed work sets its stage to face any criticism or comments from the entire world.
However, various mindsets of people enable the peer review process either to improve or else to stagnate the work quality. For example, highly egoistic, self-centered scientists often tend to shield off themselves from internal peer review, and hence get stagnated. Such scientists are not well equipped emotionally to take up challenges. Thus, the result is a mediocre quality of work that gets published but remains inconspicuous. Also, not many people get interested in such kind of work, and the progress of such work gets stunted. The number of publications of such scientists although might increase, but such work fails to attain significance.
The second scenario is for the open-minded scientists who do science for the passion for doing it. Their main aim is to contribute to significance with their work. Such scientists invite people to be more critical, especially to the internal peer review team from the very beginning. Also, such scientists, not only stay motivated to appreciate but also continuously implement the internal peer review comments. Hence, the work now becomes a center of interest for the entire internal peer review team. Thus, everyone including the peer review team gets involved with the final outcome/significance and quality of the work. As a result, in the long run, when such work gets externally peer reviewed tends to remain often flawless and achieve the highest recognition.
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| Rigorous internal peer review team-Combined strategy-THE BEST ONE!!!
Taken
together, peer review is very important for improving the quality of a
manuscript since it includes the ideas of the scientists and the peer review
team. Last, but not the least, peer review also safeguards the scientific
community from research fraud.
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