Image: children writing a letter (via German Federal Archives)

If you’ve submitted articles for peer review, you have almost certainly found yourself baffled by some of the reader reports you received.

Often the difficulty comes when two reviewers offer conflicting opinions. Reviewer No. 1suggests you cut down the footnotes while Reviewer No. 2 offers a list of sources you might use to amplify the bibliography — both excellent pieces of advice that may be tricky to implement simultaneously. Even trickier to negotiate is the ego-damaging report in which a reviewer eviscerates your argument, methodology, critical apparatus, or reason for existence. Do you take each piercing word to heart? Or just assume the reviewer wrote the report while hangry?

A simple solution can spare you months of agonizing self-doubt: Have your reader reports peer-reviewed.

That isn’t as ludicrously metacritical as it may sound. Ask a friend to look at your reader reports to judge which are helpfully critical and which are merely cranky. Ideally, that friend should have a few more years of experience in playing the publication game than you do, but any thoughtful friend who isn’t you — who hasn’t spent months researching, writing, and revising the manuscript in question— can help you regain some egoless perspective on your work.

For example, when I was smarting because a well-meaning reader had misunderstood my draft’s argument, a friend suggested ways to make my argument clearer, more prominent, and less open to misinterpretation. My friend’s suggestions helped me to stop wallowing in the old draft and turn my attention toward the revisions.

I’ve played the same role for others. Another friend showed me her reader reports after one reviewer took a wrecking ball to her article. I confirmed her suspicion that the reviewer’s chief criticism seemed to be that — although my friend had cited three of his most recent and relevant articles on her topic — she had omitted his 40-year-old article on a tangential matter. My friend then felt free to set aside his concerns in favor of the more valuable comments from a second reader report.

Whether you are asking friends to evaluate your reader reports, or returning the favor, you will gain a far more expansive view of publication practices in your field than you’ll get by being a lone wolf. If the only reader reports you see are the ones for your own work, it’s far too easy to let the inevitable criticism detract from your sense of the value your work brings to your field, as well as to contribute to your imposter syndrome. It’s hard to counter what Joseph Kasper calls “the blinding and swift confirmation of my own deficiencies found in a vigorously negative review of my work from a journal referee's report.” Reading other people’s reports or having them read yours can help you realize that these reviews — and the feelings they elicit — are ubiquitous in academia.

More important, such reading habits give you a community in which to practice — and respond to — what literary scholar Badia Ahad calls “the virtue of compassionate criticism.” Communal reading can also help to ensure that the revised manuscript you produce is a productive improvement, rather than a dysfunctional parody, of your earlier draft. If you’ve received a rejection, you don’t want to spend hours revising your manuscript to make it conform to the expectations of a journal that’s already said no. (That’s why many senior scholars advise their grad students to submit an article to three journals in quick succession before even considering revisions.) Neither do you want to waste another journal’s time, or your own, by blithely resubmitting a manuscript that could profit from the sharpening iron of the readers’ reports already on your desk. Friends who care about you — but who aren’t personally invested in your research project — can provide just the balanced perspective that you need.

You might ask: Doesn’t the concept of double-blind peer review rely on the notion that your work — and your field — will benefit from the perspectives of impartial critics?

That’s certainly the ideal I’ve kept in mind while reading and writing my early-career peer reviews. And if we were all as scrupulously kind in writing our criticism as music theorist David Huron suggests we should be in his excellent guide to writing peer reviews, no scholars would ever feel that their reviewers had abandoned surgical instruments for bludgeons. Likewise, if we were all as coolly receptive to criticism as Huron recommends we should be in his advice on responding to journal editors and reviewers, we would be able to dispassionately mend our work and get it up off of the operating table in no time. Friends can be invaluable in discerning when we — or our reviewers — have imperfectly lived up to those standards.

Despite our profession’s cherished myth of individual “brilliance” — not to mention the gendered cult of the lone author that still thrives in the humanities — few of us succeed alone. Reading, writing, and revising in community — with our friends, with the best of our peer reviewers — allows us, and our scholarship, to thrive.