Focus on Peer-review: Reviewer of the year Daniel Errandonea

By Tom Sharp on July 3, 2017

Here at IOP Publishing we are proud to recognize the invaluable service that our reviewers provide the scientific community. To celebrate their contribution, last year we awarded 1391 Outstanding Reviewer awards, and 39 Reviewer of the Year awards across our journals. Here, we focus on Daniel Errandonea of Universitat de València, 2016 Reviewer of the Year for Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.

Considering peer review a vital element of scientific professionalism, Dr. Daniel Errandonea feels it his duty to contribute his time to refereeing and sees it as a means of maintaining high standards across journals such as JPCM. In his opinion, peer review not only improves the quality of “good science” but stops “bad science” from being published.

Dr. Errandonea gains much satisfaction from knowing that his scientific expertise is valued, and is pleased to have his efforts recognised by the Reviewer of the Year Award. He takes the view that he is also an author, and understands that peer review is not a perfect process. He is wary of the possibility that original, pertinent research can be unnecessarily blocked or delayed, and advocates removing authors’ names from manuscripts in the interests of impartiality.

His advice to first-time reviewers is to ask for guidance from more experienced scientists and to follow journal guidelines – and not to take too long to respond.

When refereeing, Dr. Errandonea looks for originality, high quality and reliable data, and rigorous science. He also considers the importance of the questions addressed and evaluates the implications of the conclusions. An article on iron oxides at high pressures (Weerasinghe et al. 2015 Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter 27) springs to his mind, due to the authors’ interesting theoretical predictions.

For the full list of JPCM outstanding reviewers click here.

For Dr Errandonea’s recent work in JPCM on high-pressure phase stability and elastic properties of β-titanium alloys click here.

To read Dr Errandonea’s full interview with JPhys+ discussing his research and interests, click here.

We want to recognise and reward the contributions of our fantastic reviewers, so we are also helping all our reviewers to track, verify and showcase their peer review contributions through our recent partnership with Publons. To find out more about Publons and join over 75,000 other experts committed to recognising peer review, visit: www.publons.com/in/iop/.

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