“Creating and Supporting Trust in Research” was selected by the community as this year’s theme for Peer Review Week 2022. It’s only logical that we should take a moment to look back on this year’s theme.

This year, in celebration of Peer Review Week, we’ve assembled a collection of articles on our blog to address everything from the Peer Review Week organization and its major theme this year, “Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research”.

Obviously, it would be impossible to talk about this year’s theme of creating and supporting trust in research without a deep dive on topic. We discuss the importance of integrity in research after defining it. We also address ways in which it can be compromised and why this needs to be avoided.

Creating and Supporting Trust in Research

To support this topic, we focused on the importance of peer review to the overall process of publishing. We spoke to two of the winners of Forests’ 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award to understand how they view the importance of peer review. Prof. Dr. Stelian Alexandru Borz and Dr. Maricar Aguilos talked to us about what makes a good peer review report. We’re grateful for the time they gave us to discuss this interesting topic.

We were also extremely fortunate to have been able to speak with co-chairs from the Peer Review Week committee. Jayashree Rajagopalan and Danielle Padula were gracious enough to sit down with us for an interview. In a fascinating conversation, they talked with our own Stefan Tochev about the present and future of peer review week.

“I think that one of the main things that stands out to me as far as research integrity, is that public facing side of it, of being able to communicate […] clearly and succinctly how were studies conducted. And […] what do people need to know about them to make that information accessible to the public?” – Danielle Padula on trust in research.

We’re proud to have hosted a webinar on the subject as well. It was chaired by Dr. Ioana Craciun and featured Professor Peter W. Choate and Dr. Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi and attended by over 300 people.

Preparing Peer Review Reports

To support all the peer reviewers out there, we’ve put together some valuable tools. To learn to write the perfect peer review report, check out these 4 useful tips on how to do it. Also if you want a step by step guide of things that you should keep an eye out for check out our top 12 list. Having been learning from peer review for over twenty-five years, we hope that some of our experience and knowledge can help you to produce a great peer review report.

For the sake of transparency, we also want to share with you all our process for selecting great peer reviewers. Thus, we invite you to learn about our process and the different types of peer review that MDPI journals use.

Needless to say, we believe that peer review is extremely important and we’re happy to have participated in Peer Review Week 2022.

Looking forward

We don’t yet know what kind of opportunities will exist in the coming years to continue to create and support trust in research. Surely, these will be exciting opportunities to see what happens next. While we don’t know what the topic will be for Peer Review Week 2023, we’re sure that it’ll be as inspiring and important as this year’s topic.

See everyone next year!