Abstract:
Peer review plays a determining role in the eventual fate of
submissions to international English-medium journals. In this
study, a corpus of reviewers’ reports on 32 manuscripts in 3
different fields was solicited from a number of Iranian
graduate students and a content analysis was performed to
find the common organizational patterns and also the most
frequent types of problems noted by the reviewers. The results
revealed that review reports followed a certain format in terms
of structural organization and negative/positive balance of the
comments. Also, the results demonstrated that the most
frequent type of problems noted by reviewers were contentrelated
defects. However, because scientific information is
conveyed through the language and content failure often
overlaps language issues, language-use comments should be
considered as important.
Machine summary:
Taken together, the study was an attempt to seek answers to the following queries: • What specific patterns do the structure and format of reviewers’ reports on articles submitted by Iranian researchers in different fields follow?
The corpus consisted of 82 reviewers’ reports on 32 submitted manuscripts related to three broad disciplines, namely, Engineering, Medicine, and Social Sciences.
Opening paragraphs and reviewers’ statements highlighting strength/weakness of the manuscripts Field Number Number of Statements Statements of Opening highlighting highlighting reviews Paragraphs strengths weaknesses Engineering 27 27 30 34 Medicine 29 29 35 37 Social 26 26 30 35 Sciences The results of the analysis as presented in Table 4 reveal that all the reviews in the corpus opened up with an enthusiastic good news opener; and then, on the heels of the good news, the bad news criticizing the weakness of the research article were disclosed.
3. 2 Categories and frequency of comment types in reviewers’ reports A deeper content analysis of the reports enabled us to discern the salient types of problems noted by reviewers; and hence, to answer our second research question.
In the subcategory of lexis and syntax comments, the most frequent and salient items for Engineering field were ‘not well written/use of English, suggestions for edition of the text/ typos, lack of clarity, incoherence and repetition with equal frequency, and verbosity’.
This order was a little different for Medicine field with ‘not well written/use of English’ being the first followed by ‘lack of clarity, suggestions for edition of the text/ typos, verbosity, incoherence, and repetition’.