Professional Development


14 - The peer-review system II
The main task of the referees is to objectively review the submitted manuscript. Both referees must reach the same opinion: to approve or reject the manuscript. If each has a different opinion, a third referee may be consulted. In some cases, this third referee is the editor himself.It is not usual to accept and review manuscripts without requesting changes. The referees usually recommend major (statistical data revision or a new research) or minor (inclusion of references, new comments on Discussion or grammatical corrections) revisions.Acceptance, revision or rejection are communicated to the authors by letter (e-mail is now widely used). The referees' comments are included in the communication.The peer-review process is blind: the reviewers do not know who the authors are and vice versa. Well, actually, sometimes it is not totally blind, because researchers many times cite their previous works, which are included in the bibliography of the manuscript.