In my experience, some peer-reviewers, when they review for high-impact or tier-1 journals, spend more time and provide plenty of comments on a paper, than if they are reviewing similar papers in smaller journals.
Have you come across that? and do you think this practice is okay in science?
My humble opinion is that reviewers should be equally rigorous when it comes to the reviewing manuscripts. This may help other journals grow and have higher impacts.
When journals approach researchers for a review of a manuscript, the question that they wish to have answered is whether the article is of a sufficiently high standard to be published in their journal. Thus, reviewers ought to be reading the manuscript with both the content of the paper and the journal requesting the review in mind. Top tier journals require an exceedingly high level of novelty and impeccable experimental work, stringent analysis and a well thought out set of conclusions. Many journals tend to be happy with lesser levels of originality, and to have lower expectations for the work presented, but as a reviewer, the same weaknesses and strengths should be noted. Hopefully good feedback will be passed on the the researchers to enable them to improve their work where necessary, but when the review is returned, it should always include a specific comment intended to assist the journal editors in making a decision on the suitability of the work for publication in the journal in question. In this respect, reviewers should check the invitation letter to make sure that a manuscript is not being reviewed for a special issue on a certain topic as this would influence the suitability and specialisation of the subject matter that would be acceptable for the journal (a dedicated issue making more specialised publications suitable for consideration, for instance).
My humble opinion is that reviewers should be equally rigorous when it comes to the reviewing manuscripts. This may help other journals grow and have higher impacts.
My effort is always same based on journal guidelines and it is irrespective of impact factors.
The standards should be the same. However, some reviewers consider more effort should be invested in reviewing for top-tier journals to increase their chances of being assigned other papers to review. In some countries, peer-review is also taken into account in grant applications & evaluations.
preprint and post-publication review - the best way to handle nepotism, protectionism, plagiarism...
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