Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields.
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