Peer review for PhD students

Reviewed work on a PhD's clock

A PhD has fixed dates: a defence, the end of funding, postdoc application deadlines. A journal submission runs on the journal's clock: a single round of review often takes months, and one rejection can push a paper past all of those dates. A peer-reviewed preprint runs on yours: you decide when to upload, the reviewers answer focused questions, and you decide when to publish once they endorse the revision.

Feedback from outside your lab

Your supervisor and committee know your work well, which is also their limit: they have read every draft. Unjournal looks for the researchers whose own publications sit closest to the questions your paper raises, often people you would not have known to ask. You see the anonymized shortlist and approve it before anyone is contacted.

Your supervisor stays your supervisor

Unjournal does not replace supervision. It is a second reading by people in the field, at the point where a paper is ready to be judged. Agree with your supervisor on when a paper is ready, and on who is listed as an author, before uploading it.

Double-blind protects a junior author

Reviewers never see who wrote the paper, and you never see who they are. Nobody reviews a first-year student's name or a lab's reputation, only the paper. How double-blind review works.

How it works

1. Upload the paper (PDF or Word). It is read for the questions that need an expert, and nothing is sent to anyone yet.
2. Approve an anonymized shortlist of researchers whose own work is closest to those questions.
3. They review it double-blind, commenting on the passages that matter.
4. Revise; the same reviewers check the revision against their own comments.
5. Once at least two endorse it and none says “not yet”, you may publish it on the Unjournal preprint journal, with its reviews.

You keep the copyright, as with any preprint. If you plan to submit the work to a journal later, check that journal's preprint policy before you publish the peer-reviewed preprint.