Breaking Into Peer Review: How a PhD Student Ended Up Reviewing for Top-Tier Journals

By Qishi Zhan

The first review invitation I ever received came from one of the most selective journals in my field. I had published three papers at the time and was nowhere near finished with my PhD. My first reaction was not excitement. It was something closer to dread. The journal had an acceptance rate around 18%, and I had no idea whether I was actually qualified to judge someone else’s work at that level. I spent more time on that first review than I probably should have, reading the manuscript multiple times before I felt confident enough to write anything.

I said yes anyway, and I am glad I did.

What I did not expect was what happened next. After that first review, invitations started arriving from other journals across different publishers. None of these came through my adviser. I had not applied to anything or asked anyone to put my name forward. What I eventually figured out is that editorial networks are more connected than they look from the outside. When you do careful, timely work for one journal, editors at related venues notice. Associate editors move between journals and bring names they trust with them. The reputation you build in one place follows you quietly.

This is something I wish someone had told me earlier. Most PhD students I know assume peer review is something you start doing after you graduate, once you have enough papers and enough standing to be taken seriously. That assumption held me back for longer than it should have. The reality is that journals are constantly looking for reviewers with specific technical knowledge, and a small number of focused publications in the right area is often enough to get on their radar.

There were times I declined invitations. During my qualifying exam, I turned down several requests, and I did not lose any relationships over it. A polite, prompt decline is always fine. What matters is not saying yes to everything but being reliable when you do say yes. Editors remember reviewers who respond on time and write something genuinely useful far more than they remember reviewers who accept and then go quiet.

The practical value of reviewing, beyond anything it does for a CV, is that you start reading the literature differently. You see what separates a paper that gets accepted from one that does not. You notice how strong papers frame their contributions, where the weak spots usually appear, and how reviewers are expected to engage with them. That changes how you write your own work in ways that are hard to realize from just reading published papers.

Qishi Zhan

Zhan is a fourth-year PhD candidate studying computational mathematical and statistical sciences at Marquette University. Her doctoral research focuses on Bayesian spatial variable selection methods with applications to real-world data. She is passionate about making complex statistical concepts accessible to a broader audience.