Difference Between Paper Editing and Peer Review

• Jun 25, 2020
• 5 min read

• Tags: Academic Writing, Editing and Proofreading

It’s academic writing season! Folks everywhere are hanging out their journal articles to dry, sipping tea nervously. A journal article could be a great segway between your thesis submission and acceptance time. But a good journal article needs to be edited, proofread and peer-reviewed thoroughly. But both of these terms are not the same. Then how are they different if they essentially and superficially might mean the same thing? Read on to find out!

What is a peer-reviewed article?

A peer-reviewed article or ‘refereed journals’ has an editorial board of subject matter experts who review and evaluate the submitted articles before accepting them for publication. The steps to peer review an article are:

• An editorial board asks subject experts to review submitted articles before accepting them for publication in a scholarly journal.
• The criteria to evaluate the submissions include excellence, novelty and significance of the research or ideas.

What is journal editing?

Paper editing is to have an external editor to review your journal article for grammar and punctuation errors, structural errors, and provide suggestions regarding the written matter.  These  constructive suggestions help make your journal article more cohesive, coherent, and well-structured.

What is the difference between peer review and paper editing?

To put it shortly, paper editing is reading and evaluating a manuscript and providing constructive feedback for your journal article.  A peer review is a review done by more or less independent scholars of the same field to assess the quality of work.

Not only journals, but independent researchers can also get their paper peer-reviewed. Journals include this process in their manuscript submission guidelines, but this is not necessarily the case for paper editing. The only purpose of a peer review is to upgrade and polish the standard of a journal article, whereas paper editing aims to improve the quality of the article in terms of structuring the article, removing any grammatical and punctuation errors, etc.

An editor deals with aspects like logic, presentation, formatting, tone and style of writing. They ensure that the researcher’s opinions are presented in the best way and with an impact. Look at it like this: an editor is like a mechanic, they will fix your car and tell you what problems are there in the mechanism of your car. On the other hand, a peer reviewer is like an automobile expert who looks at improving the speed of the car, looks at how the mileage would increase, what new features can be added to it, etc. As opposed to an editor, a peer reviewer advises the researcher of how he would have conducted his research, and what research methods would have made a difference.

For a good journal article, both the editor and peer reviewer are important. While editing corrects the structure of your article whereas a peer reviewer gives you an extensive analysis. A peer review provides you with a detailed report in which the following things are checked:

1.Does the article need rewriting?

2.Is there any ambiguity regarding jargon in the journal article?

3.Does the journal article require any modifications regarding the theories?

4.Is it broadening the scope of research?

Conclusion

Both peer-reviewed and edited articles are important because the processes work as a quality assurance mechanism. Without an independent review for your article, it could just be an opinion piece. This part-disadvantageous and part-collegiate process spots flaws in your argumentation, research quality, grammar and punctuation and the interpretation of results. The difference to spot between these two can be hard and it can be even harder if you are in a frenzied state of mind because of the amount of black coffee you’ve had while writing your article. Check out PaperTrue to get quality editing and proofreading for your journal articles!

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Rishi

Rishi was a zealous student at IIT Bombay when he realized, firsthand, the power of good language in effective communication. As part of this belief, after a brief stint in a hedge fund, he co-founded PaperTrue in 2014.