Peer Reviewing for DHQ

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DHQ peer reviewers serve a crucial role for the journal, and we are always happy to have more of them. Peer reviewers perform two important tasks: first, to ensure that the materials accepted for publication are of the highest quality, and second, to provide feedback that will guide the authors as they revise their articles. Peer reviewers thus act as the first audience for a submitted article and help the author to gauge whether the argument is clear, interesting, and well-crafted. In order to ensure an efficient review and publication process, reviewers are asked to complete their reviews within a few weeks, but are free to turn down a review assignment if they are unable to meet this deadline. The review form requests both a detailed evaluation of the submitted material and concrete suggestions for improving it.

This review process is intended to serve two central goals. First, the review helps us determine whether this paper is appropriate for publication in DHQ. To be appropriate for publication, a submission must fulfill the following criteria:

It must fall within the content domain of the journal (very broadly, digital humanities and related fields).
It must be addressed to an appropriate audience. The audience of DHQ is of course centrally the digital humanities community, but it also extends more broadly to related domains and to the interested non-specialist: for instance, humanities faculty, digital artists, museum curators, archivists, and the like. DHQ articles should be clear without being elementary; they should not rely on insider knowledge, and they should situate their argument within a broader context of research.
It must have an argument, and it should represent an original contribution to the research and practice of the digital humanities field, or should offer an original analysis, critique, or viewpoint on some aspect thereof.
It must be of high quality as a piece of writing, and must present its argument clearly and interestingly. (However, we can help the author improve the writing and argumentation, so a lack in this area is not necessarily a disqualification.)

Second, the review provides feedback to the author to assist him/her in improving the submissions. Our assumption is that almost all submissions will benefit from some revision, and the goal of this review process is to help the author as much as possible with detailed, constructive criticism. Most of the review comments should be focused on how to improve the submission. Even if the paper is unsalvageable, the review should provide some feedback describing to the author where it goes wrong, so that they have a chance at doing better with their next submission. Our goal is to cultivate a thriving community and improve the overall quality of writing, not to punish people or drive them away.

To sign up as a reviewer, please send the following information to submissions@digitalhumanities.org:

Your name and email address
Your institutional affiliation and country
The languages you're able to review in
The areas of specialization you're interested in reviewing in
How regularly you would be willing to review