Critical Evaluation / Peer Review | Dr Stuart McErlain-Naylor

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Critical Evaluation

PubPeer allows users to comment on papers. Installing the Chrome extension will enable any PubPeer comments to show up every time you access a paper online that has been commented on. This can be useful for becoming aware of any controversial topics within the paper or anything that has been highlighted as a potential issue.
statcheck.io will check the statistics in an uploaded manuscript / paper for inaccuracies or inconsistencies (e.g. if the reported p-values and F-values do not match). Note that the degrees of freedom must be reported in order for this to work.

WebPlotDigitizer enables you to digitise the points in a figure and extract estimated data to perform checks or additional tests with:

Interesting visual differences in this paper between:
1⃣ whole-group relationships
2⃣ individual relationships
3⃣ individual within-condition relationships

So I decided to use WebPlotDigitizer (https://t.co/mU12pJ4tY1) for the first time and have a play around (thread): https://t.co/WhvfmlkBVn
— Stuart McErlain-Naylor (@biomechstu) February 11, 2020

Peer Review

An interesting tool to find appropriate journals for submisison is Jane (Journal / Author Name Esimator). You can paste the title or abstract of your paper into Jane and it will recommend suitable journals.

This blog by Dan Quintana provides recommendations for how to respond to reviewer’s comments on your manuscript.

Likewise, this Twitter thread has some excellent suggestions for responding to comments:

How to revise:

As an editor and author I have seen many revised papers return to journals. Given effort, most go well (ie step toward acceptance). Some go pear-shaped. I’ve slowly improved and have an approach known by my group as the ‘Breakspear method”. Here is its essence
— Michael Breakspear (@DrBreaky) June 19, 2020

On the other side of the peer review process, this article provides a 12 step guide to writing a peer review.
Some journals give authors the option to publish the peer review history alongside their article (and reviewers the option for their name to be included). An example that I reviewed is available here. A good example of a constructive and pragmatic review in the same journal is available here.