Peerspectives
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This page was designed to provide a template for educators to integrate Peerspectives into their own academic program. In addition to details regarding the purpose, learning objectives, and structure of the course, we also provide the following:
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What is Peerspectives?
Peerspectives is a highly interactive and engaging course that was designed to provide researchers with modern training and insights into the structure, purpose, and conduct of the peer-review and editing processes in scientific journals. Scientific peer review is a crucial pillar of scientific quality control and academic publishing; yet, most scientists never receive formal training on its purpose or conduct.
Structure of the Peerspectives course
Peerspectives was designed to be a semester-long course developed for integration into biomedical sciences curricula. It is possibly to run this course entirely online. This course was also designed with flexibility in mind, making it easy to adapt to various resource levels, time frames, and scientific disciplines.
Purpose
About Peer Review
Scientific journals publish scholarly articles and provide an important platform for transparent presentation, exchange, and discussion of scientific findings and developments. Peer review plays a fundamental role in ensuring integrity and quality in scientific processes.
Despite a lack of formal training in peer review, scientists are expected to contribute to, Peerspectives is an initiative that addresses this training gap.
While the scientific peer review process is not without flaws, learning how to conduct high-quality peer review is an invaluable skill for early career researchers (ECRs). In sharp contrast to the enormous (albeit controversial) emphasis on scientific publications in cumulative publication-based dissertations, university incentive structures and in career trajectories in academia, peer review training opportunities are rarely, if ever, including in graduate training curricula. This motivation drove us to create the Peerspectives peer review training program for PhD students and other ECRs in the biomedical sciences. Peerspectives introduces participants to the modern scientific publishing landscape and the actors within this system. The course allows students to refine their skills in drafting peer review reports and learn about transparency, reproducibility, and the use of modern methods. Additionally, it simultaneously serves to increase awareness of critical systemic issues including biases, favoritism, and scientific misconduct
Peerspectives strives to equip early-stage researchers with vital career-related skills and provide them with the chance to reflect on quality control and the role of the professional publishing business in science.
Target Audience
Peerspectives originated as a training course for doctoral students in the domains of (bio)medical sciences and population health with prior epidemiology or biostatistics training. Over time, the course expanded to welcome other early career researchers, such as advanced master’s students and early-stage postdocs, who have also been very successful and valuable contributors to the course.
The course can be readily adapted to other scientific disciplines or career stages. However, when tailoring it for a new context, it is essential to align the content and structure with the specific needs of the target audience.
Adapting the course to other scientific disciplines
Adapting the course to other career stages
Must tailor the course to a discipline. One-size fits all solutions would be difficult to work with and would make the quality of the course suffer
Learning Outcomes of the Course
- Explain the role of scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers as parts of the scientific process in biomedical fields
- Promote clear communication and efficiency in the review process
- Stimulate critical thinking and constructive, scientific critique
- Encourage transparency and adherence to ethical and methodological guidelines
- Introduce and explore open-access, open science, and open review concepts
- Develop an understanding of what reviewers and editors are looking for in scientific writing and improve the quality of participants’ future submission
Course Structure
Our semester-long hybrid approach to training combines a series of interactive lectures with reflection assignments to promote fruitful group discussions followed by hands-on workshops, in which students work together in small groups to review “live” manuscripts from a partnering scientific journal under the guidance of an experienced mentor with editing experience. Unlike existing peer review training workshops, our approach integrates participants into collaborative peer review in a mentored environment. ===Pre-Course Assignment (optional)===*good exercise for people to realize what they dont know, see growth
Lectures
The course begins with 4, three-hour long lectures
Homework assignments + rationale
- 4x à 3 hours (with breaks)
- On Zoom, includes interactive polls, discussions & take-home assignment
| Title (+ slides in hyperlink) | Topics Covered | |
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| Lecture 1 | Introduction to the roles of journals, editors, and peer review(ers) |
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| Lecture 2 | Peer review conduct and how to write a helpful, useful review |
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| Lecture 3 | Publish or perish? A cornucopia of contributions and credit, productivity, publication ethics, and open science |
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| Lecture 4 | From theory to practice - Review procedure & walk-through |
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Workshops
Narrative, rationale
- 4x à 3 hours (with breaks)
- 4 participants per EM
- online
- student-led
- other students contribute in the preparation
- mentor provides guidance while students drive the discussion
- cleanish report at the end
- EM submits to the journal
Post-Course Assignment (optional)
How to Plan a Peerspectives Course
Requirements to Run Peerspectives
Peerspectives in the Public Eye
Publications
Talks
| Date | Title (and link, if available) | Event | Link(s) |
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| 11 Dec, 2024 | |||
| 01 Nov, 2024 | Berlin Science Week Panel Discussion
Evaluating Researchers: Ambitions and Realities This was a joint event by the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research, the BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research, and the Berlin University Alliance, and it was hosted by Dr. Jess Rohmann. |
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| 18 June, 2024 | Peerspectives on peer review: A crash course on peer review for major biomedical journals for students and early career researchers
Workshop given by Dr. Tobias Kurth, Dr. Jessica Rohmann, Dr. Toivo Glatz, and Timothy Feeney at the 2024 Society for Epidemiologic Research Conference in Austin, Texas |
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| 03 June, 2024 | Publishing Causal Inference Methods in Applied Clinical Journals - Following the Yellow Brick Road
Turing CIIG Seminar: Dr. Jessica Rohmann |
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| 22 Feb, 2024 | Peer Review as a Vehicle to Explore the Scientific Publishing Landscape, Improve Quality, and Strengthen Methods Competencies
Stanford METRICS talk by Dr. Jessica Rohmann |
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| 23 Jan. 2024 | In this interactive workshop, students and early career researchers were introduced to concepts of research quality and open science/access.
Workshop by Noel Kronenberg, Till Adam, Dr. Jessica Rohmann, and Dr. Toivo Glatz. |
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| 06 Dec. 2022 | Improving quality of peer review reports and strengthening epidemiological methods competencies: perspectives from the Peerspectives program.
Talk by Jess Rohmann at CausaLAB Methods Series |
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| 06 Dec, 2022 | Perspectives from Peerspectives: Peer review and biomedical editing training initiative for PhD Students
Talk by Dr. Toivo Glatz at the QUEST Seminar on Responsible Research |
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| 22 Sept, 2022 | Peerspectives: Pe(e)rspectives on Peer-review
Talk given by Jess Rohmann |
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| 08 Jul, 2022 | Peerspectives: Peer-review training initiative for the biomedical sciences
Poster by Dr. Toivo Glatz for the Open X Conference of the Berlin University Alliance |
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| 21 Feb, 2020 | Peerspectives: Hands-on peer-review training for PhD students in health data sciences
Poster by Jess Rohmann for the Reward Equator Conference 2020 in Berlin |
other content
Given that scientific publications are a primary means of disseminating knowledge and are used to assess research productivity and impact and for the purposes of academic qualifications and hiring decisions (despite many known drawbacks),