WVPU's Eva Zedlacher Receives Academy of Management Best Reviewer Award
July 14, 2026
Webster Vienna Private University (WVPU) Assistant Professor of Management Eva Zedlacher was recently awarded “Best Reviewer” by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.
The Academy of Management’s annual meeting is the largest and most prestigious management conference in the world.
“The best reviewer award is very meaningful to me because it honors a voluntary academic activity and a free service to our peers,” Zedlacher said.
The academic peer review process is a quality-control system used in scholarly publishing where two or more reviewers as experts in a field evaluate and provide feedback to a research manuscript before it is published. Usually, the peer review process is double-blind, meaning both the author and the reviewer(s) do not know their “counterparts.” The goal of including anonymous experts in the evaluation process is to ensure that the study is relevant, expands knowledge or contributes meaningfully to existing knowledge, and is rigorous and methodologically sound.
Zedlacher, who engages in peer review activities for various academic outlets, believes that “expert power” is the most legitimate and effective means of quality management.
“Who else than the peers in the field could and should determine the quality of a study? Moreover, papers with rigid peer review processes often get better with each round.”
There are limitations to the research peer review process. At times blind peer reviewing may not be as independent as one thinks, for example when reviewers can guess from the dataset description or the citations who the authors are. Zedlacher experienced some “bad reviewers” on her own. “Sometimes it is difficult finding reviewers with in-depth knowledge in the respective area. Also, some reviewers recommend including models and articles written by themselves, which may or may not improve the quality of the paper,” Zedlacher said.
Given these flaws, are there alternatives or improvements to the current research-related peer review processes? Zedlacher points to review and platforms like the open science framework (OSF), where research projects and hypotheses are presented to a larger community before data collection for evaluation. Reward systems such as the Academy of Management award also ensure that review activities remain a valuable human activity for assessing (new) knowledge in the era of AI.