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Peer Reviewing Interdisciplinary Papers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2010

Marco Pautasso  and
Cesare Pautasso
Marco Pautasso*
Affiliation:
Division of Biology, Imperial College London, Silwood Campus, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK. E-mail: m.pautasso@ic.ac.uk
Cesare Pautasso
Affiliation:
Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Via Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland
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Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more frequent because many contemporary issues can only be successfully addressed by integrating different perspectives. One general feature of the various scientific fields is peer review, i.e. the assessment and improvement of submissions to journals, conferences and workshops. Whilst there exist guidelines for the peer review of mono-disciplinary articles and empirical studies of how interdisciplinary research proposals are assessed, there is still a need for a summary of issues specific to the peer review of interdisciplinary research papers. This article provides an overview of relevant questions such as whether reviewers are competent to assess interdisciplinary papers even if unfamiliar with all the involved fields. We discuss the assessment of the interdisciplinarity, soundness, novelty, influence and general interest of interdisciplinary manuscripts. Further issues include the appropriateness of interdisciplinary submissions for journals, keeping the vocabulary of new interdisciplinary fields understandable to the reader and balancing the references across various fields. Constructive interdisciplinary reviewers are likely to be just as open-minded as interdisciplinary scientists and should be rewarded more than they currently are.

Type
Focus: Central and Eastern Europe
Information
European Review , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , May 2010 , pp. 227 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2010

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