Peer reviewers are academia’s highway patrol—the officers who pull over speeders before they hurt themselves and others. The Harvard Theological Review, like other peer-reviewed journals, sends submitted articles to outside experts before deciding whether to publish. The experts assess an article’s validity, quality and originality, then recommend whether to accept the article, reject it, or ask the author for revisions. The goal is to stop bad scholarship from polluting humanity’s store of knowledge. To guard against malice or favoritism, peer review is often double-blind: editors withhold
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