Peer review is judgment exercised over someone else's unpublished work, without their knowing who you are. That position carries obligations. This page states what Peer Academics expects of you beyond the mechanics of writing a report, set out in the Reviewer Guidelines, and what happens when those expectations are not met. It sits alongside Reviewer Confidentiality and Reviewer Conflicts of Interest, which are part of the same obligation.
Impartiality
Judge the manuscript, not the people you imagine wrote it. Your assessment must rest on the question asked, the method used, the evidence presented, and the reasoning offered. It must not be influenced by the nationality, institution, seniority, gender, ethnicity, religion, political views, or language background of the authors, by the country or language the research concerns, or by your guess at any of these. Work from outside the dominant centers of a field is judged by the same standard as work from within them, and clear non-native English is not a ground for criticism; language that actually obstructs assessment should be reported as such to the editor.
Review the manuscript in front of you. Do not require the study the authors did not do, or the article you would have written. It is legitimate to say that the evidence does not support the claims and that the claims must be narrowed; it is not legitimate to demand a different project. Recognize the limits of your expertise: if part of the manuscript lies outside them, say so in your confidential comments so the editor can seek another opinion.
Tone
Write as you would wish to be written to. Criticism should be direct, detailed, and unsparing about the work; it should never be contemptuous, sarcastic, or personal. Do not speculate in the report about the authors' competence, motives, honesty, or identity. Phrases that dismiss rather than argue tell the editor nothing usable and the authors nothing they can fix.
The editor reads every report before it is released. A report containing abusive, discriminatory, or personally directed language will be returned to you for revision or withheld from the authors, and the editor will seek another reviewer. Reviewers who write such reports are not invited again.
Integrity of your report
Write the review yourself, from your own reading. Do not have it written by a student, an assistant, or a generative artificial intelligence service — the last is also a breach of confidentiality, because it discloses the manuscript. Do not recommend citations to your own work unless they are necessary to the argument, and when you do, explain why. Do not use the report to lobby for a position, a method, or a school of thought against the manuscript's merits. If you discover partway through that you cannot review the work competently or impartially, withdraw and tell the editor; that is a professional act, not a failure.
Suspected misconduct
You may notice things an editor cannot see from outside your field: that a passage appears elsewhere, that a figure looks manipulated, that the same study seems to have been published already, that the ethics or consent statements do not match the research described, or that the data behave impossibly. Report what you see. Do not investigate, contact the authors or their institution, or raise the matter with colleagues: that would breach confidentiality and could damage a person against whom nothing has been established.
How to report:
- Use the confidential comments to the editor in part E of the review form, or write to [email protected] if the concern is serious enough that you do not want to wait.
- Be specific. Give the line or page numbers in the manuscript, and the exact source you are comparing it with: a DOI, a URL, a citation, or an earlier version you have seen. "This looks familiar" cannot be acted on; "lines 212 to 240 reproduce the second section of the article at this DOI" can.
- Say what you are and are not claiming. Distinguish a suspicion from something you have verified, and say how you came to notice it.
- Complete or withdraw from the review as the editor asks. Reporting a concern does not by itself end your assignment.
The editor takes it from there: the concern is assessed, the authors are asked to respond before any conclusion is reached, the manuscript is held while the matter is open, and where the evidence warrants it their institution is contacted. You will be told that your report was received and acted on; you will not normally be told the details, and you must not disclose that a concern was raised. Raising a concern in good faith that turns out to be unfounded has no consequences for you. Raising one you know to be baseless, in order to harm an author or a competitor, does.
Allegations against a reviewer
If an author alleges that a review was biased, abusive, or affected by an undisclosed conflict, the editor examines the report and the circumstances and tells the author what was found, without revealing your identity. The editor may set the report aside, seek a further review, or revisit the decision. A reviewer found to have breached this page may be removed from the journal's reviewer pool; every permanent removal is recorded in the journal's editorial records.
These expectations are informed by the principles of the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers and of ICMJE. Peer Academics is not a member of either organization.