Supporting doctoral students and early career researchers in journal peer review in educational research: Issues and suggestions (part 1)

Journal peer review is a familiar topic for doctoral students and early career researchers in educational research. With the prevalence of the ‘publish-or-perish’ culture in academia, researchers’ performance is gauged largely on the quality of publications they produce. An indicator of this ‘quality’ is whether the outputs are published in international, peer-reviewed journals. In the discipline of education, publications in journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (that is, journals with an ‘impact factor’) are highly valued by universities. Journals indexed in SSCI usually employ a rigorous peer-review mechanism to ensure that published research is original and methodologically sound. To most, peer review is a process of checking the quality of manuscripts, implying a hierarchical relationship between peer reviewers and authors. Peer reviewers are often viewed as experts in the area, giving authoritative feedback to authors, who are expected to take up most, if not all, of the suggestions.