Crafting High-Quality Reviews: Guidelines, Examples and Feedback (Editorial‪)‬

During JSCM's last two annual Associate Editor (AE) meetings, our AEs have raised the question of how we can provide feedback to reviewers concerning the quality of their reviews, with the goal of developing reviewers and further improving the journal's review process. These are certainly valid requests. A primary responsibility of a journal editor and indeed a cornerstone of the scientific review process is to ensure a high-quality, objective review process. Good reviews benefit authors and the AEs who must integrate reviewers' evaluations with their own assessments to ultimately make a recommendation about a manuscript's disposition--rejection or invitation to revise and resubmit. Unfortunately, the peer review process is far from perfect, and can suffer from unnecessarily harsh critiques, lack of consensus among reviewers and misunderstanding concerning the expectations of what constitutes a high-quality review (Miller 2006; Rynes 2006). The purpose of this essay is to further refine JSCM's review process--to provide guidance to reviewers and to continue to develop reviewers' ability to provide high-quality reviews. As a starting point, we have "dusted off' the JSCM guidelines for reviewers, which we crafted when we first began our editorship. We have augmented these guidelines with explicit examples, based on both the best, and the worst, reviews which we have seen over the past 3 years. These examples are an amalgam of the many hundreds of reviews which we have read during this time period; the exact details have been excluded or substantively changed to protect the innocent (and the not so innocent!).