Forum

I was very interested when I heard a conference presentation by Cornelia Yarbrough, past JRME editor, about data regarding JRME reviewer comments that she and collaborator Jennifer Whitaker had collected and analyzed. Therefore, I was delighted when the authors accepted my invitation to publish their data as a guest Forum column. I am pleased to introduce this interesting project and hope that this information will help enlighten our readers, and more importantly, our potential authors.

Analysis of Reviewer Comments About Quantitative Manuscripts

Accepted by the Journal of Research in Music Education

by

Cornelia Yarbrough

Lousiana State Universiy

Jennifer A. Whitaker

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The JRME is the premier refereed research journal in our field. To maintain that status, we, as authors, reviewers, and editors, continually strive to improve the scholarship of articles submitted and accepted for publication.

The purpose of this study was to analyze reviewers' comments for quantitative manuscripts with regard to the following categories: section discussed (e.g., review of literature, method, results, discussion, conclusions);- specifically, what the comments suggested or critiqued; and finally, whether the comments were positive, negative, or instructions for the improvement of the manuscript. Finally, we wanted to present recommendations for the future submission and review of manuscripts based on our findings.

Procedures

We analyzed the reviewer comments for all accepted quantitative manuscripts submitted and accepted during the time period from July 2003 through November 2005 (N = 35).1 We began by determining whether the method used by the author was experimental (n = 20) or descriptive (n = 15). A total of 1,734 reviewer comments from 165 reviews written by 18 reviewers was categorized and coded.

Using the major sections of quantitative methodology, we examined critically the reviewers' comments regarding each section, for example, the title, topic, abstract, introduction, statement of the problem, research questions, review of literature, method or procedures, results, discussion, conclusions, references, tables, and figures. We circled comments, numbered them, and identified each numbered segment as referring to one of the major sections as listed above. Then we determined whether the comment was positive, negative, or instructional.2

After identifying the section being discussed by the reviewer, we briefly described the specific issue identified by the reviewer for that section. For example, some of...