Tag Archives: education

How to Do a Peer Review: Part One

Posted on February 4, 2026 by | Leave a comment
by Jose Rodriguez, MD, FAAFP, Meharry Medical College School of Medicine, Nashville, TN

As journal editors, we fundamentally believe in peer reviewing. Peer review helps make published papers higher quality. Objective experts and peers often see areas in a manuscript and research study that the authors and editors did not elucidate. Journals in general (and Family Medicine specifically) have a hard time finding peer reviewers. Doing a peer review takes time, is unpaid, and often feels like one more thing for already overwhelmed faculty. On behalf of the editorial team of Family Medicine, we are writing a series of blog posts about why we think you should sign up to be a peer reviewer (Family Medicine), how your expertise can contribute to the mission of the journal, and step-by-step instructions on how to construct a valuable peer review.

Why Was I Asked to Do This Review?
We often hear from early-career faculty that they don’t feel qualified to conduct peer reviews because they aren’t “experts.” Our Associate Editors aim to include a diversity of viewpoints in each manuscript. So, they may ask an expert to comment on the methodology or the statistics. But we also want input from our readers. Yes, you may not be a content area expert, but if you are a reader of the journal, your opinion is valuable. If you didn’t understand some of the paper, then other readers may also not understand. You should feel empowered to include comments to the editor about which aspects of the paper you feel qualified to comment on. I will often state, “I am not a statistician, but the numbers do not make sense to me.” If it doesn’t make sense to you, it may not make sense to others, so we want to know!

Getting Started
If you do not know where to start, go to the reviewer page on the journal’s website. There is a lot of material about how to do a peer review. Alternatively, you can ask a senior colleague or mentor for help. If you feel comfortable doing the review, then the first step is to read the paper. Most people recommend reading the paper through to the end the first time and not getting bogged down with comments or questions.

The first questions to ask yourself after you read the paper the first time are: 

1. Did this make sense?

2. Does it add to the field?

3. Does it matter?

4. Is it written well?

Often, we don’t notice if a paper is written well, but we do see if it is written in an unclear manner or if there are typos or grammatical errors. Those errors, while easily corrected, usually signal that the manuscript needs more work.

The Second Time Through  
After you have done a full read of the paper and answered some general questions to yourself, it is time to reread it. This time, when you read it, we want you to focus on all the details. We want reviewers to pay attention to the details of every section of the paper. The following two blogs will go section by section with descriptions of what to look for and how to provide feedback.

How to Organize Your Review
This is a matter of personal preference. Some reviewers organize their reviews by section. So, they start the review with comments on the title and continue with comments on the abstract, the introduction, the methods, the results, the discussion, the tables, the conclusion, and the references. Other reviewers prefer a more “free form” review, using bullet points or a numbered list to capture all the comments for each section. But, bottom line, we want reviewers to carefully assess all these sections of the paper. As editors, we must see in your review that you read the paper. A one-sentence review that is general, like “this was a great paper” or “this paper is not acceptable,” without comments on each section or other specific evaluative statements, is not helpful in the evaluation of a paper.

Tone and Goal of the Review
The overall goal of any peer review is to make the paper better. As such, we ask that you frame your feedback in a constructive manner and avoid disparaging comments. SS once had a reviewer say, “if the authors had only read the literature, they wouldn’t have made this mistake.” A better way of phrasing that same sentiment would be, “I suggest that the authors review these papers to get a different perspective on the subject.” These two phrases say essentially the same thing, but one is much more respectful. Remember, academic family medicine is a small community. Treat the authors as if they knew it was you writing the review, and keep your comments constructive and respectful.

The next two blogs will review how to evaluate specific sections of the paper in your review.

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Writing With a Team

Posted on November 18, 2025 by | 1 comment
by Sarina Schrager, MD, MS,
Family Medicine Editor-in-Chief

Writing for publication is hard work, especially if you are doing it alone. I find that having a team to write papers with makes the experience easier and more engaging. But, in order to make the process move smoothly, it makes sense to spend a little bit of time at the outset to set some ground rules.

  • Delegation of responsibilities—There are a lot of details to address when writing a paper and I find that is pays off at the end to be clear about who is going to do what at the beginning.  My colleagues and I divide tasks, including being in charge of the reference manager, finding author instructions for potential journals, and delegating one person to be the “corresponding author”. The designated corresponding author will be responsible for sending calendar invites, Zoom meeting information, and reminders throughout the process.
  • Authorship guidelines—You want to avoid any misunderstandings about author order or even who is included in the author list. There are myriad ways to decide who will be the first author and the senior author. It is helpful to talk about this order at the beginning. There may also be decisions about who is going to be an author vs being acknowledged at the end of the paper. I have had situations where one of the co-authors ended up doing much more work than the person who was designated as the first author and the group had a conversation about reordering author lists.
  • Outline of paper—Before starting to write, the group should sit down and develop an outline of what needs to be covered. During this process, different authors may volunteer (or be assigned) different sections. You may elect to use a Google Doc or have people write their sections in Microsoft Word to be forwarded to one designated person to integrate each section into the whole document.
  • References—You may also want to decide how to designate references at this point. Should authors put citations into a comment?  Or at the end?  It is helpful to be clear about this at the beginning. Some people may want to number their references, but this makes integration more challenging, so I usually recommend writing the author’s name and a date in parentheses and just adding the citation somewhere in the document.   It is also helpful to decide at the beginning how you are going to manage references. It can be tricky to integrate several different reference lists from different (or even the same) reference managers. One way to manage this aspect of your paper is to assign someone at the beginning to be in charge of references and have each author forward citations to that person.
  • Deadlines—One thing I love about writing in a group is that everyone is accountable to each other. Unless you are planning to submit to a special issue with a rigid time frame , writing a paper comes with artificial deadlines. But, that said, setting firm deadlines and scheduling regular meetings can keep a project moving forward.
  • Editing—Once each author has written their first draft and the sections have been assembled into one unique document, one author may take the lead in making the paper sound like it has one voice. People write differently and it can be distracting to read a paper that is obviously written by different people. Each author will then want to edit for content and readability using track changes. Ultimately, the corresponding author will accept all track changes and finalize the paper.
  • Post–writing tasks—After you are finished writing the final draft of your paper, someone needs to take the lead and submit the paper to the desired journal. This process, even after reading the author instructions carefully, can take a couple of hours. The corresponding author (often the first author but sometimes the senior author or one of the other contributing authors) will need to upload information about each author, designate suggested reviewers (for some journals), and write a cover letter among other tasks.  Also, it is a great idea to discuss who will take the lead in revising the paper if you get a revision request from the journal and who will be responsible for resubmitting to a different journal if your paper is rejected.
  • Opportunities for mentoring—Writing in a team is an excellent way for more experienced authors to provide support and mentoring to more junior authors. By using clear communication and empowering junior faculty to take ownership of the writing process, mentors can role model a streamlined and effective way to write for publication.

See our recent FM Focus on this topic, “Team Writing Etiquette in Verse”  Team Writing Etiquette in VERSE

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Behind the Curtain: What Really Happens After You Submit a Paper to a Journal

Posted on May 3, 2025 by | 2 comments
By Sarina Schrager, MD, MS, 
Family Medicine editor-in-chief

Many people express confusion about the process of submitting a paper to a journal, receiving peer reviews, and ultimately getting published. This post attempts to answer your questions. Editors do not want their activity to be opaque. We want everyone to know what really happens when you submit a paper. The team at Family Medicine may do things a little differently than other journals, but the major steps will be the same.

You hit “submit”, then what? Once you submit your paper into the electronic portal (we use ScholarOne) the paper will be evaluated by our editorial assistant. S/he will determine if your paper conforms to our author instructions (please read before submitting) for formatting and whether you have IRB approval, if needed. The assistant will unsubmit your paper if it is too long, has too many references, or if the references are not in the proper format.

First review by the editor in chief: At Family Medicine, I read each submitted paper carefully before assigning it to an associate editor. I will occasionally reject a paper at this stage if it is not in scope for our journal (ie, we do not publish clinical papers) or if I think it is in the wrong category. For example, papers describing educational studies in one residency or one medical school fit in our Brief Report category, but probably not in Original Research. I will send those papers back to the authors if they are submitted in the Original Research category and ask the author(s) to shorten them. Another common mistake I often see is papers submitted as a narrative essay when they are really a commentary or an editorial. Narratives are personal stories about an experience you have with patient care, teaching, or your career.

Assigning papers to the associate editors: We have a team of fabulous associate editors at
Family Medicine. Papers that are both in scope and of interest our readers go on to the next step. I assign these papers to one of our associate editors who carefully reads the paper again, and either advises me they don’t think the paper is appropriate for our journal, or, more commonly, sends the paper for peer review.

Requesting peer reviewers: We have hundreds of peer reviewers who volunteer their time and expertise to help us publish the best papers we can. The associate editors aim to get 2-3 reviewers to evaluate each paper before sending it back to me with a recommendation. The associate editor sends requests to 4-6 people. Sometimes these invited reviewers don’t respond, and sometimes they respond but decline the invitation. It will occasionally require upwards of 10 invitations to find the 2-3 reviewers needed for a thorough review of each paper. We give all peer reviewers 3 weeks to return the review. Sometimes a
paper will be caught in this step for a few months. Family Medicine designates 4 potential
outcomes for a paper after peer review: accept (it’s very unusual to accept after initial peer review),
minor revision, major revision, and reject.

Revisions: The vast majority of authors will be asked to revise their paper. This is a good thing.
It means that the editorial team believes that the paper will be an important addition to the literature when revised. We expect authors to respond to every reviewer comment and explain how they addressed each comment. After the revised manuscript is submitted, I will review it again and then send back to the associate editor. In some cases, if there were many revisions, the associate editor will send the revision back to the reviewers to assure that all comments were addressed. After those reviews come back, the associate editor indicates an outcome. It is not unusual for a paper to be revised a second (and occasionally a third) time. It is important for authors to remember at this point that these further reviews are designed to improve your paper.

Recommendations for publication: Even great papers can be improved, and this is always the goal of peer review. Our peer reviewers and our associate editors provide feedback to authors to help make
their papers better. A minor revision decision signifies that a paper needs only small changes before it is appropriate to publish. A major revision decision signifies that the peer reviewers and the associate editor like the paper and think it has potential to be a meaningful addition to the scholarly literature, but has some weaknesses. We do not ask people to revise a paper if we do not think it will be interesting to our readers and contribute to the literature. Those papers are denied further review.

Acceptance: Once the associate editor believes that the authors have addressed all revision
requests, they send it to me with a recommendation for publication: Yay! Our production
team has worked hard to decrease the time from acceptance to online publication. You may expect your paper to be published online about 6 weeks after you get your acceptance notice. It will be available on the journal’s ‘Recently Published’ page before being assigned to a monthly issue. As you can see, there are a lot of steps in the process! However, they all aim to support authors through optimizing their paper’s impact.

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