Contents

Peer review

We are incorporating peer review in this module because it is an important part of the research endeavor and scientific discourse. What’s surprising, however, is that while we are taught how to do science and how to write up our own work, we’re never really taught how to write about others’ work, whether it’s a summary, critique, constructive criticism, or something else. Maybe this is why so many scientists have to face the diatribe of Reviewer #2 [1]. Since giving feedback and receiving feedback is valuable to everyone, we will practice it here, in the context of our final presentations.

Discussion

Reviewer assignments

Speaker

Reviewer

Alexa

Megan

Eddie

Alexa

Kevin

Eddie

Luis

Kevin

Mack

Luis

Megan

Mack

As can be seen from the table, each speaker will have one reviewer, which will hopefully be good practice without feeling overly burdened. Please fill out your review in the peer review form by 11:59PM AoE today. After all the reviews are in, we’ll send them out to the speakers through Slack DMs.

Suggested approach

Here we’d like to offer a suggested course of action, but ultimately we leave it up to you to determine what will enable you to write an effective peer review.

  1. Know which speaker you’re reviewing!! Obviously we hope you’ll pay attention to all the presentations, but for that one in particular you’ll want to pay extra close attention. 😜

  2. Take notes on a piece of paper or an electronic document. You can also take notes directly in the peer review form, but that might overly constrain your ideas in the moment, so we invite the stream of consciousness to occur separately and you can organize your thoughts later.

  3. Ask the speaker questions if you feel like something is unclear or missing. You can still point this out in the review itself, but since the presentations are live, this is a nice opportunity for you to collect more information and strengthen your peer review.

  4. After all the talks are over, go through your notes, maybe compare with the presentation details provided on the Final presentations page, and organize all of your thoughts into a coherent structure for a cogent peer review! As long as you aren’t commiting the sin of Reviewer #2, you’ll be fine.

  5. Submit the peer review form!

References

1

Steve Cranford. I don't know it for a fact... but they're definitely reviewer #2. Matter, 3(5):1377–1379, 2020. doi:10.1016/j.matt.2020.09.028.

Day 14: Slam presentations Final presentations