In most professional communities, articles submitted to journals are subject to a process known as peer review. In this process, reviewers (also sometimes called referees) read over the paper to determine whether the article is appropriate for publication in that journal and, if so, provide suggestions for improvement. When done well, the peer review process improves the quality of all papers in the field by ensuring that work which is published is honest, accurate, and easy-to-read. 

In PHYS 211, we want to introduce you to the process of writing a journal article and undergoing (and participating in) peer review. By seeing the work of your classmates and by getting direct, constructive feedback, you will hone your scientific communication skills.

The writing and peer review process is broken up into several phases. Your journal article and your participation in the peer review process will each carry the same weight as a normal analysis or report. (That means that this quarter you will have seven grades total – two analyses, two reports, your aggregate meeting score, the aggregate journal article score, and the peer review.)

The process is broken down as follows:

• First draft:
  • Article proposal: You will submit a “proposal” for your paper including a short (1-2 paragraph) explanation of the topic, a rough outline, a list of improvements you plan to make, and a list of external references.
  • First draft: You will submit a first draft of your article that expands on a report from a previous quarter and presents the work more formally.
  • Self-evaluation: You will also submit a self-evaluation. What do feel are the strengths of the paper? The weaknesses? Where do you plan to make improvements in your next draft? Do you have any specific items you want your reviewers to look at or to comment on?
• Peer review:
  • Peer review of others: You will complete a peer review of two other students’ articles. Your grade for the peer review is based on the quality of your reviews of others’ work, not on the feedback you receive on your article.
• Final draft:
  • Final draft: You will incorporate the feedback from reviewers and revise you paper into a final draft.
  • “Letter to the editor”: After receiving feedback from the TA on your analysis and comments from reviewers on your first draft, you will need to draft a response addressing how you have incorporated this feedback and how you have improved the paper.

We will look at each part in more detail below, but let us highlight the technical requirements for each assignment here so that you can easily consult them as you work on this project.

Since science communication is somewhat different from other types of writing – like a history report or an expository essay – we'd like you to read over the following two short pieces:

• “The Science of Scientific Writing”, an article by George G. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, (1990).
• “Presenting your Results”, an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the book Experimental Physics by Walter F. Smith (ed.), 2020.

There is no assignment to complete, but we do strongly encourage you to read these carefully and reflect on both what you find interesting and what you find useful advice as you start your writing project. 

If you were a student in PHYS 211 this past Autumn Quarter, then you completed the first part of the My First LaTeX Document assignment. You can review Part 1, and move on to Part 2.

If you were not a student in PHYS 211 this past fall, you should complete both Part 1 and Part 2 in order to become familiar with Overleaf and with LaTeX in general. (Start early – in case you have questions – but the two assignments should each take only about 1 hour or less.)

Regardless, we are providing a full Overleaf template for you just in case you were unable to do something you wanted to in the assignment (or in case you deleted the documents from previous quarters). Click the link below to view the template, then make a copy in your own Overleaf account:

Most published journal articles are not freely available. However, the University pays subscription fees for access to many journals and you can view individual articles either by retrieving them through the Library's website or by first logging on to the University of Chicago Virtual Private Network. An overview of options is available here on the University Library page, but we will summarize the two methods below.

If you are connected to the Internet through the University's network on campus (wired or via wi-fi), you should be able access references directly from journal websites (at least for any Journal to which the University subscribes… which is many, many.)

To access an article through the Library website if you are not on a campus network…

1. Go to the  University of Chicago Library website and click on “Articles, Journals & Databases” to open the search bar.
2. Search for the article you want. If you know the exact article, use as many terms (title, author, etc.) as you can to find the exact record. If you are searching more generally, use keywords.
3. When you hit click “Search”, you should be prompted to log in with your cnet ID before being shown the results.
4. Use the “Find It” links next to search results to access the digital version of the article.

Logging into the University's VPN reroutes your internet connection and provides you with a University of Chicago IP address that allows you to access resources as though you were on a University Network-connected computer (like a computer in the Library or the UChicago wifi network).

If you already have VPN set up, then this an even simpler way to access journal articles; all you need to do is find the article either on the Library website or on the journal's own website, and you will have the correct privileges to access it without additional login barriers. However, setting up the VPN for the first time is a little bit difficult (and when connected, all your traffic – not just article searches – are routed through the University network… which you may or may not be comfortable with). If you want to try it anyway, information on how to set it up is provided here.  

Look over the experiments you completed in Autumn and Winter quarters and choose one to expand into a full paper. A suitable experiment should be one that you understand very well, but for which there is still something that can be improved upon as you expand it into an article. We do not mean that you need to collect more data or do new analysis… we mean that there is something about the writing, data presentation, discussion, etc. that can be improved. Examples might include figures that can be redone to be easier to understand, a more complete uncertainty analysis, further comparison of data to predictions, a more complete description of a technique used, etc. Or, maybe the improvement comes completely from the context you add – through an introduction that ties the work to a larger topic or through a discussion that goes deeper than you originally were able to. Look specifically at TA feedback for other suggested improvements.

Avoid choosing a report that was low-scoring or where you feel like there were issues with the underlying data or analysis.

The proposal should be short and include the following:

• Which experiment will you write about? 
• Why do you think this represents a good analysis for you to expand into a full article? What do you hope to do by exploring and writing about this topic further? (About 1-2 paragraphs.)
• What is the rough outline of the article? (Can be presented as a list with bullet points, but be detailed where possible.)
• What are additional references you can consult to provide more context for the paper (including, for example, introductory material and motivation, alternate experimental implementations to compare to, or theory and experiment papers for predictions and literature values)?
  • Include at least a few references (three to six maybe, to start), including both historic and modern papers if possible.
  • For each reference, include a sentence or two of annotation describing why the paper may be useful.

You may write the proposal in whatever program you want – Microsoft Word, LaTeX, Google Docs, etc.

Peer review only works if you submit a finished version of the report for review. Therefore, the grade for your first draft is based entirely on whether or not you submit a complete article. Each of your two peer reviewers and the TAs/lab staff will evaluate whether the draft is complete and provide a score.

A complete draft is not necessarily one that is ready to be published. Instead, it is a draft that has complete and well-considered sections; all the relevant figures, tables and captions; a full set of appropriate references; and no missing text or incomplete arguments. It should be formatted correctly and overall look “presentable”.

The first draft should be typeset using LaTeX using the REVTeX 4.2 documentclass and with the preprint and linenumbers options. The preprint option will create a well-spaced out document that is easy to read and make comments on for your peer reviewer. The linenumbers option numbers each line of the draft so that reviewers can more easily reference lines in your paper when making comments in the report.

Given that editing often is done to make a paper shorter and more compact, you are allowed to exceed the maximum word and figure count (3500 words and 5 figures) in the first draft, but by no more than 25%. (So, no more than about 4500 words or 6 figures.) Tables count toward your word count, but not your figure count.

The self-evaluation serves several purposes:

• It is a chance for you think carefully about what you have done and what still needs to be done. Remember that one of the purposes of writing a journal article is to categorize your own thoughts, and you should use this as a chance to articulate what you think you have done well and what you have not in order to help you plan for the next draft.
  • Even though this is your first draft, you already wrote a zeroth draft (your analysis or report in a previous quarter) and got some feedback from the TA. How did you incorporate that into this rewrite?
  • You have (hopefully!) grown as a physics student. Has anything about the way you think about experimental physics changed that informed how the draft changed when going from analysis to article?
  • Did you redo any of the analysis or recreate any of the plots? Did you substantially change your conclusions or your rationale for things?
• It is a chance to guide the reviewer in what to look for in the journal article.
• If you are unsure about how a section comes across, point it out so that the reviewer knows to give feedback on that point.
  • If you are yourself confused about something, be honest and ask advice from the reader.
  • If you are especially pleased with how something is presented, talk about that, too!
  • The self-evaluation is not super-formal, but should written in full sentences and paragraphs (not fragments or bullet points). It should be about one or two pages; use as much space as you need to make your points. You may write it in whatever program you want – Word, LaTeX, etc.

Your first draft submission will be evaluated based on the following rubric with the usual 0-4 point scale. The final grade will be assigned based on the average (on a 4.0 scale) over all rubric items with completeness worth 3x the weight of all other categories.

Each peer review will contain the following four parts:

1. an evaluation of the completeness of the article;
2. an evaluative summary based on a rubric with comments on each category;
3. general comments about aspects done well and aspects which need improvement; and
4. direct annotations and comments on the journal article draft.

You will be graded for this part on completeness and quality of feedback. Your comments and scores will not affect the grade received by your classmate. Their comments will not affect your score. Be honest, but keep in mind that peer reviews are not anonymous; your feedback should be civil and constructive.

Guidelines for these four parts are as follows.

Evaluate the completeness of the article based on the following rubric.

If you score the paper lower than a 4, provide a comment explaining why.

Examples (a non-exhaustive list) of why a paper may be score less than the full 4 points include the following:

• There are holes in the text where more information looks like it will be added later.
• There are placeholders where figures should be (or references to material that was never added)
• Sections are missing or are blank, or sentences or paragraphs end in the middle.
• The paper is significantly too long (way more than ~4500 words) or too short (way fewer than ~2000 words), or there are too many figures (more than 6).

Examples (a non-exhaustive list) which do not make the paper incomplete (and for which you should not take points off) include the following:

• There are steps in a derivation or theory development that you would like to see but which aren't there.
• There is a figure that you wish was included, but which the author neither mentions nor includes.
• You want to see more background, theory, error analysis, discussion, etc.
• You disagree with an argument or you can think of an additional argument.
• The paper does not include a section which was part of the original experiment. (Authors are allowed to choose what to include or not; omitting a section of the original experiment is fine.)

If any of the above (or similar) apply, you should make a comment in the general comments section or a direct annotation. You should not deduct completion points. If you have questions, please ask the lab staff for help.

Consider the following questions and evaluate the report as a whole on the scale provided. Remember, the scores you give will not affect the person’s grade and are meant only to help in completing revisions.

• How many formatting errors did you notice in this report?
  • none / a few / many
• How many typos were in this report?
  • none / a few /many
• How is the writing in this report? Consider sentence structure, grammar, word choice, organization, etc.
  • clear and concise / work needed / confusing or difficult to understand 
• Did this report accurately convey what was done during the experiment?
  • clear and correct / some details missing / many errors or omissions
• Were the conclusions supported by the data?
  • supported / some gaps / unsupported
• Overall, what is your opinion of this report?
  • Great! (~A) / Good (~B) / So-so (~C) / needs significant work (~D) / unacceptable (~F)

In addition to the rubric score, you should give comments in each category detailing why you awarded the points you did.

NOTE: You may assign any value you want from 0-4 in each category. The descriptive words above are meant only to help you understand the scale, not to indicate which values are allowed and which are not.  

Answer the following questions. Answers should be one or more paragraphs. Give as much feedback as you can.

• What was done well in this report? 

• What advice would you give the author for improving this report?

Make comments directly in the article. Point out particular typos or formatting mistakes, ask questions, or compliment specific things. Don't forget to complement things which you feel are done well!

Your peer review comments will not affect the grade of the person you are reviewing. However, you are graded on the quality of your reviews.

All rubric items carry the same weight. The final grade will be assigned based on the average (on a 4.0 scale) over all rubric items.

After receiving the peer review reports for your own lab, you will have two weeks to revise and resubmit. The grader will use the same criteria used in the peer review process and will also assign points for overall general quality and presentation.

The final draft should be typeset using LaTeX using the REVTeX 4.2 documentclass and with the reprint option. This will create a professional-looking final article in the same style as seen in American Physical Society journals.

Unlike the first draft, there is a strict word/figure limit (3500 words, 5 figures). Failure to adhere to that limit will result in a full 1.0 point (out of 4.0) penalty. Tables count toward your word count, but not your figure count.

It is common during peer review for the author to submit a “letter to the editor” along with the revised draft. This letter should discuss how (or if) the paper has changed and how (or if) the individual comments and concerns of the reviewers were addressed. Depending on the feedback, this could be a simple acknowledgement of incorporated changes or it could be a longer discussion of fundamental re-thinking of the presentation.

Sometimes reviewers give conflicting advice. The letter gives you a chance to defend your choices on what advice to follow and what to discard and to provide feedback to the editor on how helpful (or not) the process was.

Note that you might even learn something from reading your classmates' papers! If a technique, a style quirk, or a presentation device catches your eye in someone else's paper or influences how you make edits, mention that, too.

In order to evaluate the final draft, the grader will read over your paper and assign a numerical grade of 0-4. There is no explicit rubric for grading, but they will consider the following:

• Technical evaluation: Is the paper complete and formatted correctly? Are the results are technically correct? Are the conclusions supported by evidence?
• Overall impression: How effective is the paper? Is it easy to read and follow? Are the arguments persuasive and complete? 
• “Letter to the editor”: Did the writer incorporate feedback appropriately? Do they effectively show how the paper improved?