No Free Lunch: Suggestions for Improving the Quality of the Review Process

The review process has issues, reviews take too long and many are not sufficient for authors to improve their submissions. In this paper, I present the root causes for these problems and stipulate that any proposed solutions will need to address these issues to create sustainable improvement. Additionally, I list five basic activities that need to form the basic actions for proposed solutions. Finally, I make six potentially controversial proposals for improving the review process. The key proposals include performing a faculty task analysis that adds in and includes time for performing reviewing and changing the tenure and promotion process to give credit for performing reviews.