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Informed and competent reviewing is crucial to the integrity and quality of published scholarly work. It is a time-consuming, arduous and mostly anonymous and un-rewarded task, but publishers, editors, authors, readers, and the scholarly enterprise more generally, benefit and depend upon this unsung labour.

Science & Education journal is noteworthy among education journals for having competent reviewers from the disciplines of Education, Science, Mathematics, Philosophy of Science and Mathematics, History of Science and Mathematics and Psychology. Manuscripts are usually reviewed by three scholars, and often by four, five or even more established scholars from different disciplines.

The following are comments by authors on the journal’s review process:

I am impressed with the thoroughness and quality of the reviewer comments at Science & Education compared with other journals (a reputation I knew of, and which I have now experienced).

I have never been provided with such a comprehensive body of criticism to any paper I have submitted to press. Furthermore I agree with most of the criticism and believe it will help me to improve on the paper. There are some issues I do not agree with, but I will argue this in detail in my response.

Thank you for the time and effort put into my paper … I thank reviewers for exhaustive suggestions. I find these very helpful, since in small and closed academic communities of physicists and philosophers, as it is still the case here in my country, it is hard to find a competent forum for discussing the borderline “obscure” ideas. So mainly I stand on my own, although I held degrees both in physics and philosophy. I hope that my views would mature enough to be resubmitted, someday.

Again, many thanks for your support and encouragement. Too few journals take the time to give authors so much feedback on their work. It meant [a lot] to see so many people reading our work so carefully.

We are thankful for the decision of sending the manuscript to 8 competent reviewers. Despite the bigger amount of work, we are sure that it has greatly improved the quality of the paper. The decision demonstrates your awareness of the complexity and interdisciplinary character of our proposal. This is confirmed by noticing that the reviews address different issues, which are related to different parts of the article. It also attests your commitment to the quality of the papers published in Science & Education.

In any case we would like to express our very many thanks to all four referees for what they have done for us. They surely helped us in a way that is quite uncommon in the scientific community. Even better, we have to state that there are no words to express our gratitude to them. We are proud to have such a competent and helpful colleagues.

Thank you for sending the manuscript to four senior scholars for review. … I have never received comments and criticisms from such wide perspective. This will definitely help to improve on the overall quality of the paper.

One reviewer has written:

I have reviewed for other journals. I certainly must say that you provide excellent support to the authors. You are providing excellent service to researchers. Reading other reviewers comments is also a great learning experience for me.

A regularly updated list of scholars who review for Science & Education can be found here.