The web portals of these research journals must upload all peer reviews to authenticate their claims.
KARACHI: Peer review refers to the evaluation of a research article prior to its publication. The editors of research journals in Pakistan are supposed to get a submitted article peer-reviewed by the experts in the field in order to maintain and enhance the quality of research by detecting weaknesses and errors in research articles. The editor of a peer-reviewed journal must refer a submitted article to peer reviewers in order to obtain an unbiased evaluation. Sometimes, a peer reviewer may advise the article writer to revise his/her piece of work twice or even three times. A good editor must not return an article to its writer if it contains errors and must ask him/her to revise it as articles are often read and debated for a long period and by a wide audience.
Except for a few research journals, in Pakistan, most journals do not produce high quality articles. The reason for this is that the editors often do not refer the submitted article to peer reviewers and when they are referred, it seems that no revision in the article takes place following input given by the reviewer. The readers of these research journals can easily tell whether the article writer took pains while doing his/her research. Most published articles in Pakistani research journals have nothing new or original to share with readers.
I request the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to devise a system to detect this vulnerability. In this regard, the HEC can bind the editors of research journals to include names of the peer reviewers along with the name of the article writer when publishing articles. It should also be mentioned how many times the article writer was asked to revise his/her work. The web portals of these research journals must upload all peer reviews to authenticate their claims. The uploaded peer reviews can prove a good source of learning for students of research and it will also make the peer reviewers take the article and the task assigned to them more seriously.
Jawed Ahmed Khursheed
Published in The Express Tribune, March 6th, 2014.
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