Writing Manuscripts for Peer Review: Your guide to Not Annoying Reviewers and Increasing Your Chances of Success
Citation: Claire Z. Kalpakjian, Michelle Meade (2008/07/25) Writing Manuscripts for Peer Review: Your guide to Not Annoying Reviewers and Increasing Your Chances of Success. Sex Disabil (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/s11195-008-9090-z
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/s11195-008-9090-z
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/s11195-008-9090-z
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Writing Manuscripts for Peer Review: Your guide to Not Annoying Reviewers and Increasing Your Chances of Success
Download: http://faculty.tru.ca/mreudink/3300 Lectures files/Kalpakjian%20%26%20Meade%202008.pdf
Tagged: Education
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Summary
in Kalpakjian's article, "Writing Manuscripts for Peer Review", Kalpakjian starts the article in an interesting route. Unlike most writers who either ease into the topic or who start explaining what's wrong with most writings, Kalpakjian starts her article by stating ways writers wastes time. She then starts to number the ten steps such as not spell-checking or being inconsistent throughout one's Manuscript and explains after each numbering why that step would be unprofessional. Kalpakijan, however, explains it in a way that makes it sound like she it's ok to do these steps which bring up a sarcastic tone and really pulls the point across to the readers.
1) Don't spell check
2) Do Not Follow Instructions
3) Conduct a Poor Review of the Literature
4) Pay Little Attention to Statistics
5) Be Inconsistent Throughout Your Manuscript
6) Provide a Confused and Disorganized Results Section
7) Misinterpret Results
8) A Picture is Worth a Thousand words
9) Have the Reviewer ask..."Haven't I Seen This Before?"
10) Argue with Reviewers
Afterwards, Kalpakjian's tone becomes more serious as she then begins to explain the important elements of a paper. This can be seen most obviously in the amount of detail and care she uses when explaining how to improve one's writing. Kalpakjian does this by bringing in outside sources, different authors and sites that support her reasoning but by also making clear and concise subheadings thus making it easier for the readers to follow the main idea. The ten key points that she hits concerning a well written paper is organization, focus, the right amount of detail, the paper's structure and style, a concise framework, a paper with an accurate statistical analysis and results section, reporting standards, special consideration for rehabilitation research, by having a co-authorship (for reasons of having another writer checking off that they agree with you), by learning from your reviews, and finally to not be too hard on oneself and just enjoy the little victories.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
The importance of the article is that writing is an important skill set that is widely used in various occupations. As a result, writing can be a skill that can benefit almost everyone but is also a skill that can almost always be improved. Kalpakjian's article is one of many articles that tries to explain to readers how to improve their writing and what they could possibly be doing wrong but she does so in a rather uncommonly fashion.
