Peer Review
Peer review, also known as expert review, independent scientific review, or auditing, is a method used by administrators, funding officials, journal editors, and researchers to inform decision making and to improve the research process and outcomes by engaging independent and qualified experts to provide critical and consultative evaluation of the merits of a research project or product, proposal.
In colleges, universities, and independent research institutions, peer review is often a required internal gatekeeping process through which research proposals must successfully pass before investigators submit proposed research projects to ethics review boards or external funding sources.
These internal peer reviews are conducted by faculty members, researchers, and others with the expertise and knowledge to render decisions of quality and to offer improvements. Outcomes include approval for external submission, guidance for a revision and resubmission, or the project’s dismissal.
Peer review is often the preferred method for judging a proposal’s merits and rigor for research funding and for deciding how best to allocate scarce public or private resources. Whether conducted by an individual or by groups sometimes called panel reviews or review committees, peer review for governmental and private foundation and trust funding focuses on the proposed project’s significance and methodological integrity.
Peer review is considered the highest and most rigorous form of editorial review in determining the publication merits of papers, chapters, and books. With scholarly or academic journals, editors and their boards of reviewers (referees) serve as the major gatekeepers for judging what texts are deemed to be of the highest quality and significance and therefore worthy of publication.
To ensure the greater independence of the peer reviewing process, some editors also combine peer review with what is called blind review, in which the referees do not know the identities of the authors and the other reviewers and the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers.
In qualitative projects, researchers may call upon peers with relevant methodological and content area expertise and experience to scrutinize and critique a study’s procedures and outcomes. This type of peer review, sometimes called investigator triangulation, provides researchers with an objective source familiar with the research or the phenomenon being explored to review the study’s methodology, to analyze portions of data, and to critique findings.