September 16-20th, 2019 is Peer Review Week. This is the 5th annual event celebrating the vital contribution that peer review makes to upholding quality in scientific publishing. As a journal dedicated to cutting edge chemical engineering research, The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering relies on the discerning work of our reviewers to ensure the high quality of our articles. Thanks to all of our reviewers!
This year’s Peer Review Week theme, Quality in Peer Review, invites us to take a serious look at what makes peer review important and how we can ensure it meets high standards of quality. Here at Can. J. Chem. Eng., we know that peer review can be stressful, but we want to remind you of all the reasons that peer review is amazing and explain a few things that we do to ensure a rigorous and smooth peer review process.
To build that process, we start with our Editors. Our Editor-in-Chief, João B. P. Soares, and his team of associate editors are experts in their fields and they work together to ensure that each paper published in our journal is of the highest quality. When it comes to peer review, they screen papers to make sure that they fit within the scope of the journal and then they use their expertise to select the best reviewers for each paper. Our editors strive to have each paper undergo unbiased peer review from at least two expert reviewers – a process that they ensure is constructive and quick (30 days average time to first decision).
Our reviewers also work extremely hard to help authors shape their articles into publishable science. Because of its blind nature, reviewing can sometimes feel like a thankless process, but Can. J. Chem. Eng. is pleased to partner with Publons to help our reviewers get the recognition that they deserve. We also love to thank our reviewers in person at our annual reception at the Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference (CCEC). In order to make your life as a reviewer a little bit easier (we know how busy you are), we make sure that only articles that fit our journal’s scope and are coherent get sent out for review. Our reviewers consistently provide constructive, perceptive, and timely reports and every time you respond to an email from us agreeing to review a paper, we are so grateful.
Quality in peer review is, of course, crucial for our authors. You’ve done the hard work, and the journal and your reviewers want to help you publish the strongest research possible. Ensuring that our authors experience quality peer review means working with our reviewers to make sure that their reports are filled with useful feedback. For all of our authors, but especially early career researchers, the speed of the review process is vital. Our editorial office as well as our editors and reviewers understand the urgency: you want to get your innovative research out as soon as possible. At Can. J. Chem. Eng., we believe that speed is a crucial part of quality in peer review and we’re proud of our average of 1 month to first decision.
The final important participants in the peer review ecosystem are our readers, whether experts in the field or members of the public. A high-quality peer review process leads to high quality papers, which in turn leads to trust in the work that Can. J. Chem. Eng. publishes. This is our ultimate goal: that our community knows that the research we publish has been fully vetted and pushes forward our collective knowledge of what chemical engineering can do.
We are happy to be celebrating Quality in Peer Review this week and we commit to upholding it every week because we value the trust placed in us by our community, who knows that articles published in The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering meet the highest standards of quality. Thanks again to all of our reviewers, editors, authors, and readers for playing your parts in maintaining Quality in Peer Review at Can. J. Chem. Eng.