Is it ethical to a professor to accept a manuscript for review, and then have a graduate student referee it? What about assisting as a referee?
I understand that graduate students can be involved in the review process- this isn't my question. As far as the journal/editors are aware, the professor is the referee, but in actuality, the student is performing the review.
If an assigned referee would like a student to participate, how could this be done properly?
Is it ethical to a professor to accept a manuscript for review, and then have a graduate student referee it?
Though commonplace in some fields (or among some professors), the practice of passing the review to a student, without the agreement of the editor, is utterly unethical for at least two reasons:
Moreover, in some cases, publishers ask to treat the manuscript as confidential, and in that case passing it to someone else can be considered as a breach of confidentiality.
The proper way to handle this passage is the following: the professor should write to the editor refusing the review and suggesting the student (or any other person) as a possible substitute, possibly outlining the credentials of this person to serve as reviewer. Then, the editor will decide what to do with this piece of information: either pass the review to the suggested reviewer or choose another reviewer.
While I agree that unacknowledged reviewing is unethical, I would like to offer a counter-point on how I have often seen review "subcontracting" done ethically.
In communities that acknowledge and support the practice of involving students / postdocs / etc. in reviewing, there is often actually an official means of an invited reviewer designating the person they "subcontract" the review to as a sub-reviewer. This puts both the original and the secondary reviewer officially into the process and is fully transparent to the editor.
EasyChair is an example of a platform that supports this, and when I am acting as Program Chair of an EasyChair conference, I appreciate this feature greatly. It means that I know which reviews have been done by a junior rather than the original PI, which also most definitely affects how I weight the judgement thereby expressed.
I disagree with the other voices here. Although it would seem unethical to suggest that a professor has reviewed a document which has only had a student overview, there are two points to make:
In any review-based system, no one can guarantee that any review is perfect; only the aggregate effect of many such reviews creating a resource of high quality. Thus the review process for a highly respected journal is much more stringent than that of an 'easier' one.
On the side of the reviewer, this is a responsibility-based role, not a procedural one; what is important is that the professor is willing to stake a measure of their reputation on the review; if the graduate knows more detail of the field and the professor trusts their judgement, it could be a more thorough review than the professor could provide. As long as the professor judges the reviewer to be competent, that is their responsibility.
Finally, having a student review a paper may well be only part of the process; give it to a couple of students, see if they come up with anything. If they don't understand it, or they discover flaws, then the professor can review the paper herself in that light. Just because the graduate student has reviewed a paper doesn't mean that the professor will just pass the review on without comment.
The key, though, is that the journal is only asking that the professor provides responsible and competent feedback, and signs off on the review. How the professor reaches that goal is up to them, and peers that provide poor reviews should be excluded from the review pool (and associated privileges) by the journal. There is no magic to a professor reading a paper, and their judged competence to do so is only based on the university's assignment of professorship and the academic's history of research. Everything builds on expectations and responsibilities, not on some procedure having been carried out; the procedure is only there to make those responsibilities explicit.
I have seen the following situation. Professor X is assigned to review a paper, which is also publicly available on the arXiv. Professor X assigns a student to read and present the paper in a seminar, and during the course of discussion between the student and Professor X, an error is found. Professor X then summarizes the error in his or her referee report and recommends rejection. This seems pretty kosher. The only negative I see is that X did not acknowledge the student's contribution in his or her letter. But since this would only be seen by one other person, the managing editor, I'm not sure how important this is.
