Special Cases

This module will discuss reviews for articles other than the typical empirical article, including dissertations, literature reviews, book reviews and reflective practice pieces.

The great majority of the peer reviewing you will be asked to do will likely be empirical articles, but on occasion you may be asked to lend your talents to reviews of different types of manuscripts. Below we will examine some of these and include info on how to tackle them. You may also receive special instructions from the editor for these types of reviews and can certainly ask for more information if you need it.

Dissertations

Doctoral students are often encouraged to turn their hard work on the dissertation into an article for publication. Roughly only a quarter of dissertations actually become empirical articles (Evans, Amaro, Herbert, Blossom, & Roberts, 2018). Part of the reason for this may be that the average dissertation can run into the hundreds of pages while a manuscript for review is typically between 10 to 30 pages. That means that in reviewing a former dissertation the reviewer needs to be attuned to some of the most common carryovers in cutting a dissertation down to size:

Too much focus on the literature. While most scholarly work situates itself within the prior literature, a dissertation’s literature section likely runs at least two dozen pages, at a minimum. Distilling the literature down from exhaustive to just enough to provide content for the present research can be one of the difficulties in converting doctoral work into an article.

Repetition. By the nature of writing an extensive work such as a dissertation, some information and sections are repeatedly restated, and summaries of sections happen within every chapter. In a much shorter work, this repetition is tiresome rather than helpful and the reviewer would help the writer to note when redundancies occur in the text.

Findings. Sometimes the findings of a dissertation are broad and wide ranging, and too much to adequately address in a single publication. It could be helpful to point out to the author if the article could be broken up into multiple publications. While at the outset that is more work for the author, the upside is that multiple publications have the benefit of, well, multiple publications.

Meta analysis

For a meta-analysis a great focus needs to be the data and the analysis of the data. What studies were included and/or excluded and why? Are the criteria for inclusion clear and logical?

Review Articles

Reviews look at a review of the existing literature on a topic. Depending on the journal, they may be exhaustive or concise in their both scope and length. What they should not be is simply a summary of the literature. Silvia (2007) points out that the greatest problem with reviews is that they just catalog the topic but don’t make an original point or draw a novel conclusion. In reading a review article, see that the author goes on to make a point about the work they have reviewed rather than just regurgitated a bunch of studies.

Book Reviews

Some publications specifically ask that reviews of books or texts within the field are not either overly glowing or overly harsh. The purpose of a book review is to highlight a new text within the field. While the reviewer can certainly provide a nuanced opinion of the text overall, the goal of a book review is to provide an overview of content along with some notes on if, or in what ways the text would be useful to experts in the field.

Reflective Practices

Reflective practice pieces may be more informal and even include first person. In these pieces a practitioner of some sort, often an educator, is aiming to record a particular pedagogical approach or analysis of a problem they encountered within their work. In these pieces the literature review would not be as exhaustive as in a traditional empirical article and the structure itself may deviate from the traditional five sections of an empirical study.

References

Evans, S. C., Amaro, C. M., Herbert, R., Blossom, J. B., & Roberts, M. C. (2018). "Are you gonna publish that?" Peer-reviewed publication outcomes of doctoral dissertations in psychology. PloS one, 13(2), e0192219.

Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to write a lot. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.