{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01992966002344666, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01078546307151231, 'mean_word_length': 4.892265193370166, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 1, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
From the Editor—On Peer Review: Improving the Credibility of Social Work Scholarship

Scholarly peer review is the process of having research and other scholarship submitted for the scrutiny of experts in the field to determine their opinion. JSWE and most other academic journals use blinded peer review to advise the editor on the relevance, coherence, and credibility of submitted manuscripts. We keep a list of more than 200 reviewers who represent a variety of social work programs, interest areas, and methodological foci. To be a good reviewer, one must have the willingness to perform a review and the time to perform that task carefully and completely. Further, reviewers must have broad and deep knowledge of at least one problem area or at least one methodological approach (preferably both), enough selfawareness to remain unbiased in their criticisms of blinded manuscripts, sufficient writing skills to explain in detail how manuscripts need to be revised, and enough patient beneficence to word their criticisms as kindly as possible. I am extremely grateful to the many reviewers who consistently respond to our requests to review manuscripts, complete the reviews on time, and write thorough reviews that focus on a manuscript’s potential contribution to the field, its grounding in previous social work scholarship, the rigor and reproducibility of methods, and the logic of exposition. On the other hand, some contributors who have submitted manuscripts to JSWE wait a longer time than they, or we, would like before learning whether the paper has been accepted. When I assumed the role of editor-in-chief, one of my personal goals for the journal was to reduce the time to make decisions because social work scholars, and in particular pretenure faculty members, need to be able to see their publications accepted for publication and in print. Although I have made some progress in this regard, we still experience some dismaying delays in the review progress, and much of this delay is because of the difficulty in finding reviewers for a given manuscript. Sometimes we need to ask more than five people on our list of reviewers before we can find someone to accept a manuscript based on the title and the abstract. Occasionally we need to ask even more potential reviewers if they will accept a manuscript. Why is it sometimes so difficult to find a reviewer? Most of us would agree that faculty are busy people, and being a journal reviewer is not a priority. It might be that a manuscript does not seem interesting or might not be firmly in one’s substantive or methodological areas of expertise. If these reasons explain the difficulty in locating reviewers, then JSWE staff need to find ways to increase our pool of reviewers. Even if all social work faculty members served a 3-year term as a reviewer, the question of whether service as a reviewer is more work than it is worth would remain. Although many of us derive intrinsic rewards for reviewing manuscripts, such as keeping up with current research or seeing other reviewers’ comments about a manuscript, serving as a reviewer is usually seen by our fellow faculty members and our deans and directors as a service rather than as a scholarly activity. Because scholarship is generally weighed more heavily than service in evaluations of faculty performance, because the quality of peer review is important to social work scholarship, and because publication of social work scholarship is critical to the profession, we may need to reexamine incentives for serving as a peer reviewer. If performance as a peer reviewer is to count as a part of social work scholarship, then we need to be able to appraise the quality of those activities. Because almost all social work publications use blinded review, in which reviewers’ and authors’ identities are not made public, scrutiny of performance is difficult to accomplish. To appraise the quality of reviewing, the process must be visible and accountable. Indeed, the effectiveness of open peer review, in which reviewers reveal their identity to manuscript authors, has been a topic of empirical study and debate since the 1990s JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION 2017, VOL. 53, NO. 4, 577–579 https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2017.1376953