Learn · Peer review
Peer review a paper without becoming Reviewer 2
A reviewer has substantial power and, occasionally, a track-changes habit. The important move is telling a real flaw from “this is not how I would have done it”, then writing a review you would sign with your name.
After this guide you will be able to:
- Classify each point before it goes in your review.
- Keep a preference from becoming a demand on the author.
- Order the review so the editor can act on it.
Use my preferred method.Can this method support the claim?
Is it a flaw, or just not your method?
Before a point goes in your review, decide which of six things it is. Only the first two are demands the author must meet.
| A point can be | What it means | Is it a demand? |
|---|---|---|
| A methodological flaw | the design or analysis cannot support the claim | Yes |
| A reporting deficiency | the work may be sound, but you cannot tell from the text | Yes |
| A legitimate disagreement | a defensible choice you would have made differently | No, raise as a suggestion |
| A reviewer preference | your taste in methods, framing, or citations | No, set it aside |
| A discipline mismatch | the wrong standard for this kind of paper | No, drop it |
| AI-generic criticism | a checklist point that never touches this paper | No, delete it |
Why the last four are the dangerous ones
A missed flaw is a normal limit of review, and the other reviewer or the editor often catches it. The damage comes from the other direction: dressing a preference as a requirement, applying the wrong field's standard, or pasting generic criticism that could apply to any paper. Each one costs an author real time on a change they did not owe, and it is the mark of a poor reviewer. So the discipline is to demand only what is genuinely a flaw or a reporting gap, and to label the rest clearly as a suggestion.
Order it so the editor can act
An editor reads your review to make a decision. Order your points from fatal to editorial: the flaws that decide the paper first, reporting gaps next, suggestions last, each mapped to a specific line. A review that buries a fatal flaw under twenty style notes has reproduced the manuscript’s problem in miniature.
Keep the manuscript confidential
A paper under review is confidential. Do not paste it into an external AI service unless the journal explicitly permits that use and the service meets the confidentiality terms you accepted. Otherwise, you may be disclosing unpublished work to a third party. As an IEEE Engineering Management Review editorial argues, a single upload can break all three of peer review’s commitments at once: the manuscript’s confidentiality, the reviewer’s own accountable judgment, and the author’s intellectual property. It is not hypothetical. One analysis found roughly 21% of reviews at a major 2025 machine-learning conference were AI-generated, and some authors have started hiding prompt-injection instructions in their manuscripts to trap reviewers who paste them into a chatbot. Follow the journal’s policy; where tools are allowed, a local workflow keeps the manuscript on your computer.
The self-check before you submit. Read your review back and ask of each point: is this a flaw, a reporting gap, or my preference? Would I make this demand if my name were on the review? Removing the points that fail that test is what separates a fair review from a harsh one.
Write the review you would sign.
You have a manuscript to review and a page of notes, and some of them are real flaws while others are just how you would have done it. Sorting them by hand, under a deadline, is how a preference slips through as a demand. The Reviewer's Notebook gives you the field guide and a local-first triage tool: classify each point into one of the six buckets, map it to a line, check it against the reviewer traps and the integrity questions, and export an ordered review and an editor summary. It structures your judgement. It does not review the paper for you, and it never leaves your computer.
See the Reviewer's Notebook · €39Related guides
See also how to respond to reviewers, the author's side of the same exchange, and how to write a scientific paper. More guides are on the Learn page.