Dissecting peer review with G. Dunn
Channel: Federica Bressan
Date: 2019-10-19

This video is part of the teaching material I have produced for my project on peer review. 
Read more: http://federicabressan.com/peerreview/
Get in touch: http://research.federicabressan.com/

Transcript: 
[Q] What's your field?
Philosophy with a concentration on ethics, philosophy of religion and philosophy of popular culture. 
[Q] As a reviewer, how do you approach peer review in your field?
When preparing a peer review, I generally start by trying to summarize the article in a few sentences without editorializing about it in any way. My aim is to identify the questions that addresses and briefly to summarize his argument and inclusions. When evaluating the article I look at whether those questions are interesting and important and whether its conclusions in addition to being original follow rigorously from the author's arguments, other objections that the author hasn't anticipated; are all the steps of the argument clearly presented, and all of the assumption spelled out? I'm mainly concerned with how well the argument holds together logically. In addition, when evaluating the article's conclusions, I consider whether they're likely to be of interest to other researchers in the field. So does this article make a genuinely original contribution? Does it open up possibilities of new directions in research that could prove fruitful? Other considerations are whether the quality of the writing is up to professional standards, whether more background information is needed and whether any other relevant considerations are missing. When writing the review why I always try to say what I like about the article even if in the end I'm not going to recommend it for publication. Also when giving critical feedback and I try to be as specific as possible. And couch my criticisms as recommendations for improvement. Sometimes, however, an article maybe just so carelessly written and its argument so shoddy and irremediably bad that all I can do is point out its failings.