About Peer Review
Many journals including PWRD use peers to evaluate submitted papers. There is no “higher authority” obligated to review papers. The reviewers are authors’ professional colleagues who are doing volunteering review work. In the majority of cases, the reviewers are authors who have published or are publishing papers in the subject area;
In recent years, PWRD editorial board processes about 1500 papers/year or 120 paper/month. The volunteer workload is high. For example, each paper requires at least 3 reviewers. So the editorial board needs to find 2500 reviewers per year, assuming each reviewer is willing to review about 2 papers per year;
Unfortunately, there were only about 35% submitting authors (about 500) contributed to paper review per the 2014 record. This is why the review system is overloaded;
To be fair to the PWRD community, it is reasonable to expect an experienced author to review 1~3 papers per every one of his/her papers submitted. This is because 3 or more reviewers have made it possible for this author’s work to get evaluated;
If authors do not contribute to peer review, none of their papers can be reviewed properly. The review system cannot function and this is a lose-lose situation. On the other hand, if most authors volunteer for paper review and perform good reviews, all authors will benefit from a more dependable review process. Helping others is to help you – the authors.