What is Peer Review?
Peer review simply means that one scholar reads and gives feedback on another scholar’s paper.
It is a practice drawn from academic publishing, where articles and books submitted to publishers are read and evaluated by subject-matter experts to ensure that they are accurate and significant contributions to the scholarly record.
Peer review is everywhere in law: the separation of powers, trial by jury, and appellate courts are all forms of peer review. Giving and receiving feedback on written documents is daily life for lawyers—sometimes with high stakes and quick turnarounds.
Accordingly, peer review is part of the written work requirement for J.D. students at HLS.
Why We Do Peer Review
The purpose is to make our papers better. Personalized feedback is the most helpful thing anyone can give a writer.
You are the one person unable to evaluate your own paper effectively. Why? Because you already know what your argument is. If there are gaps in your paper, your mind will automatically fill them in. Someone else who doesn’t know your argument won’t be able to, so they’ll tell you where the holes are.
Peer review is quality control. When you need to make a major life decision, you discuss it with family and friends because testing ideas from multiple perspectives is how we ensure that they are good. Studies show that people who adopt a “growth mindset” and organizations that foster a “culture of feedback” create higher-quality products. Empirical research shows that student papers that receive peer review are higher quality than those that don’t.
Giving feedback doesn’t only help the writer who receives it. The writer giving feedback benefits from (1) seeing strategies that other writers use for shared writing challenges, and (2) articulating the rationale for why a certain adjustment should be made, thus formulating principles for good writing.
Calibrating for Peer Review
Every paper in the history of the world could have been better. The goal of feedback is to make any paper—the weak, the strong, the excellent—better.
Giving feedback is not about editing. Proofreading a paper—fixing grammar and punctuation errors, making the language clearer and more concise—is important, but that’s not what peer review is for. A reviewer can and should note if language mechanics need attention, but that editing should be done by an author prior to giving a paper to a peer for review. Giving feedback is more properly about the quality of ideas presented in a paper.
Writing is intensely personal; receiving comments on your writing is emotionally complex. As a commentator, you want to validate the considerable work done to produce a paper, but you must also help the writer improve the paper.
Giving an assertive suggestion about how to make a paper better, which the author is totally free to ignore, is much better than milquetoast feedback that doesn’t help the author improve the paper.
The Peer Review Process
Giving Feedback
Meaningful written review takes time: allow for up to an hour for every ten pages being reviewed.
It’s best to provide written review in two forms:
Marginal Comments: Record your thoughts on the paper as you read. These don’t need to be polished ideas: they’re reactions, notes to yourself about what you’re thinking as you read.
Feedback Letter: Write a one- to two-page letter to the author that synthesizes points-of-focus for revision. Start with the positive: identify the best aspect(s) of the paper. Second, articulate the writer’s central argument in your own words. Finally, provide a list of three to five areas for further development. Give each a name (e.g., Implications, Missing Evidence, Structure of Introduction) and a short explanation.
Receiving Feedback
Comments on papers are rarely a To Do list of corrections.
When you receive comments, break them down into a list of individual suggestions. Write out what you would do if you were to revise the paper based on each. You won’t always choose to include every revision, but you owe it to your paper to test out what a revision for each suggestion would look like.
Exercise judgment about which feedback to follow. Not all advice will be good. You know your essay best and care about it most: you are the final decision-maker about what you should say. You don’t need to make your essay into a piecemeal clunker that tries to do everything reviewers want.
You will need a method for organizing, evaluating, and deciding which items of feedback to take on board. Identify your top three priorities for your revision, summarize the feedback you got on that area, and describe the specific action you can take to revise that area.
Revision is not about going back to fix a paper; it’s about further developing an idea that was first formulated in a draft and then writing a new paper for the new and improved idea.
Discussing Feedback
One of the great joys of life is writing something and then talking about what you’ve written. Not only has the author written a paper, but the reviewer has written some notes on it—you’ve got a lot to talk about, so have a conversation.
Face-to-face discussion isn’t required, but it’s where the real magic happens. All you have to do to have a good conversation is just … talk about ideas. You are two people trying to get to the bottom of something. partners-in-thought developing an idea as big as it can go. Often conversations come down to the question, What are you really trying to argue here?
Conversations allow you to test out ideas to see which ones get a positive response. Keep following the ideas that get energy and excitement in the conversation.
Plan to chat for about 25 minutes. That is the golden time—long enough to allow for depth and digression, short enough to focus conversation on the higher-order areas in need of attention.