Peer Reviewing Scientific Research and Publishing

 

In July this year, 2025, I graduated from the Institute of Physics (Publishing branch) Peer Review Excellence programme. Rigour and integrity is their motto. They aim for the very highest scholarly standard of communication across books, journals, science news and media, conference proceedings.

The programme is aimed at young early career physical science researchers (Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Earth Sciences) with PhDs in the sciences, trying to hone their skills to a high standard in peer reviewing. It gives you reviewer competency, and a standardized quality of peer reviewing in order to become a trusted, ethical & confident reviewer. 

The programme also gives you valuable experience points.

Here's the beautiful certificate and badge they gave me after I passed all their assessment tests with flying colours. The tests were taken from heavy going Physics research and real examples of scientific errors which you had to spot, analyse and evaluate. 

Not everyone passes. You have to do all the modules and achieve 70% in all tests to graduate. But if you fail to get 70% on any one test you cannot carry on with the programme. The next module stays locked.

I was invited to join the IOP's peer reviewing team and Physics journal which I take as a great honour. They told me to go and show off about my achievement so I am! I'm proud of this achievement.

I wanted to study Physics and Music at university (Imperial College/RCM). That was before I studied Philosophy. Luckily, philosophy allows me to be very broad so I can still do Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics, and Philosophy of Music.

This programme has given me a great deal of confidence and know-how which will be of great help with my philosophy, philosophy of science, and science writing (for which I undertook a course a few years back now) especially when disseminating, and evaluating philosophical and scientific research papers.