A new expert-informed guide to writing effective peer review responses has just been published in Conservation Physiology, following up on a widely-read guide to writing constructive peer reviews. Both editorials will form the focus of a peer review webinar hosted by Conservation Physiology in May 2026, as part of the journal's Community Conversations webinar series aimed at Early Career Researchers.
Writing and responding to peer review is a fundamental part of academic publishing, but recent reviews of the field show that formal training opportunities and best practice guides are rare and inconsistent. This new editorial answers an industry-wide call for more guidance and training on all aspects of the peer review process.
Key take-away messages from this new editorial advise authors how to "pick their battles", disagree constructively, seek clarification from reviewers, carefully structure their responses and maintain professional courtesy to mitigate impacts on reputation and mental wellbeing.
Other tips and tricks in this editorial address the consideration of language barriers, maintaining communication with the editors and best behaviour for handling manuscripts that may have been unjustly rejected.
This new editorial builds on an widely-read previous editorial authored by the same team and published in Conservation Physiology in December 2025, which provides tips and tricks for writing constructive peer reviews and is now being used to inform peer review policies for other industry groups and society journals.
"A core message of these editorials is that the stereotypical view of peer review as a combative fight between authors and reviewers to get scientific work published doesn't need to hold," says lead author of the first editorial, Dr Jeff Clements from Fisheries and Oceans Canda (Gulf Region), Canada. "The goal of peer review is not to crush souls – it is to constructively evaluate the quality of scientific data and elevate a piece of written science to be the best version it possibly can be. We think that our advice provides the necessary basis to do that in a collegial manner."
"We all drew heavily on two aspects of our experiences in pulling these two editorials together," says lead author of the new editorial, Dr Sean Tomlinson of Curtin University, Australia. "The first was our collective experiences as research scientists as we've all received our fair shares of "Reviewer 2" types of assessments, which are at best unhelpful, and at worst damaging to the self-esteem of the authors, especially authors early in their research careers."
"The second set of experiences that guided these editorials was our collective experience as editors responsible for communicating peer reviews to authors and evaluating the responses to peer reviews. We were aware of how inefficient poor-quality reviews make the publication process, and that the best way to reduce that inefficiency was to raise the standard of reviews and responses to those reviews."
The reaction to the first editorial has been widely positive, with the guidance now being used as teaching tools for graduate students and inspiring the creation of the second editorial, as Dr Tomlinson explains: "It was evident that we couldn't offer clear and explicit guidance solely to the reviewers, without also making it clear to authors how to respond to peer review clearly, respectfully, and above all strategically, in order to streamline the review and publication process."
An upcoming webinar in May will draw on the content of these editorials to launch a discussion of often-misunderstood areas from both ends of the peer review process, and to bridge communication gaps between research article authors and reviewers. Webinar registration is now available on the Society for Experimental Biology's website .
These editorials have been written with an audience of scientific researchers in mind, but the guidance is applicable to wider academic and professional fields.
Additional coauthors of the editorials include Steven J Cooke (Conservation Physiology Founding Editor), Bridget O'Boyle (Editorial Office Manager) and Andrea Fuller (Editor in Chief).
Conservation Physiology is an online only, fully open access journal published on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology by Oxford University Press. The journal prides itself on serving the community of conservation physiology researchers through its publishing activities and wider initiatives.
