As part of my ongoing series on how I’m publishing my first peer-reviewed journal article, today I’m talking a bit more about peer review. Last time I talked about getting feedback from my peers in the academic program I’m in. That feedback has been very helpful, and my writing is better for it. That said, we’re all students, and having someone with more experience take a look at my writing was also on my wish list. Thankfully, the Library Writing Cooperative’s First Draft Matchmaker program offered to help me out.
The Library Writing Cooperative is a group of librarians who are dedicated to making academic publishing in library and information science more accessible. They host a monthly writing time, they celebrate National Article Writing Month (NaArWriMo), and lucky for me, they manage the First Draft Matchmaker program. The premise is simple: more-experienced published authors sign up to offer feedback on writing, and less-experienced or unpublished authors request feedback. All of the reviews are provided by volunteers, you can specify what kind of feedback you’d be most interested in, and a few weeks after you send your draft, you’ll get some feedback.
The application process to request a review is straightforward: I just entered some information about my work and my needs into a Google form on their website. Within a few days, I got an email back explaining the next steps, and inviting me to send over my manuscript. I did so, and got confirmation that they’d received it and were looking for reviewers to take a look at it. About a week later, I received confirmation that two reviewers had volunteered to provide feedback, and a week after that I had received feedback from both reviewers. It was a very easy process, and the response time was amazingly fast.
So who were my reviewers? Both are librarians, and one is co-editor of a journal. Both have published extensively. Both had experience that related directly to the topic I’m covering in my article. I couldn’t have asked for better matches, honestly.
The feedback is amazing. No Reviewer Two Syndrome here. They addressed my abstract, introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis, and conclusions. They talked about whether my conclusions were supported by the evidence, how my arguments were laid out, and how I could strengthen the evidence presentation. They discussed ordering and structure, including where to streamline, where to add detail, and where to add transition segments to make my writing less jarring. They even noted a few areas where I’d gotten my citation formatting wrong. From top to bottom, conceptual to technical, the feedback was wonderful. I learned so much just by reading through the feedback they left for me, not just about how to improve this article, but how to write better articles in the future, and how to communicate more effectively in general.
The feedback was beneficial for producing a better article, but it was also encouraging to me as a writer and a student. They went out of their way to point out areas where my writing was strong and my reasoning was well supported. It’s always a nerve-wracking experience showing your work to your heroes, but I came away from this experience with a whole lot of things I can improve, and instead of feeling daunted by it I feel excited.
So, now I have more feedback. It requires me to rethink some things, restructure some things, and rewrite some things. Some of the fixes, like the citation changes, are easy. Most are going to require some significant thought and time and effort, because they’re not line-edit suggestions for replacement phrasing, but suggestions about how I reason, and how I communicate that. This is the best kind of homework, the kind that changes the way I think and not just the words on the page. But it also takes time and energy, two things that will be in short supply for the back half of this semester. Still, I’m not going to let the opportunity go to waste. I’ll implement as much of their feedback as I’m able to before the final draft deadline.
Would I do this again? Absolutely. And I would strongly encourage any aspiring article writers in LIS to take advantage of this wonderful resource. And if you’ve got some experience under your belt, please volunteer to be a reviewer! You can have a big impact on the future of the field this way. I’m the proof.