Review fairly, and sign it with your name.

The risk is not the flaw you miss. It is the problem you raise that is not one.

There are many guides on how to review a manuscript, and almost none on how not to become a poor reviewer. The Reviewer's Notebook is the second kind. You leave with a review that improves the paper, ordered from fatal to editorial, every point mapped to a line, with preference and discipline-mismatch named and set aside.

What a review point can be

The whole method rests on one distinction. Before a point goes in your review, decide which of these it is. Only the first two are demands.

• A genuine methodological flaw. The design or analysis cannot support the claim.
• A reporting deficiency. The work may be sound, but you cannot tell from what is written.
• A legitimate disagreement. A defensible choice you would have made differently.
• A reviewer preference. Your taste in methods, framing, or citations.
• A discipline mismatch. The wrong standard for this kind of paper.
• AI-generated generic criticism. A checklist that never touches this paper.

The Notebook shows you what to do with each of the last four, so they do not end up as demands on an author who does not owe them.

What's inside: 4 files

• Reviewer's Notebook PDFThe field guide: before you start, failures by section, the reviewer traps, the decision tree, the language bank, the integrity self-check, and decision checklists.
• Review Triage HTMLLocal-first tool. Classify each point, map it to a line, check it against the traps and integrity questions, and export an ordered review and an editor summary. Nothing you type leaves your computer.
• Field checklists MarkdownFailures by section, the five decision buckets, and the integrity questions, tickable in Notion or Obsidian.
• Worked example PDFOne paper, a poor review and an improved review side by side.

Confidentiality

What it is not

Pairs with: the author's side

The Reviewer's Notebook is one half of peer review. The other is the Reviewer Response Builder, which helps an author answer a review and show every comment was covered. Together they are Peer Review, both sides: the standard you hold as a reviewer, and the coverage you show as an author.