Friday, December 18, 2009

Peer reviewing: then and now

I refereed two papers this week. I think that between the commentary we wrote for our meeting session and the research paper I have in press, I got integrated into the publishers' systems, and associated with certain keywords; neither paper was passed to me by my adviser, rather I was asked to review directly by the subject editors.

In contrast to my earlier experiences as a reviewer, these went really well. Both papers were fairly straight forward and right up my alley, with nothing that I felt was outside my expertise. I think that the growth I attained through writing my dissertation made me feel much more equipped to critically read these papers. Moreover, both papers were really good. The combination of nice manuscripts with my defense-enhanced confidence made doing the reviews something of a pleasure instead of the anxiety-filled example of impostor syndrome that I felt when writing reviews in the past.

That's nice.

2 comments:

Unbalanced Reaction said...

Yay! That's pretty neat to be asked to review papers already!

Ms.PhD said...

Yay! Glad to hear you felt more confident and less impostor-like.