How to be a Peer Reviewer 2

What is it about?

This article is the second of three educational resources that deal with being a good peer reviewer. This second article describes HOW to do the peer review of a manuscript In the first article in this series I presented reasons why you should say yes when asked to serve as a peer reviewer. I hope I was able to convince you of the benefits of serving as a peer reviewer and you have accepted an invitation to evaluate a manuscript. Now what do you do? Since you might be blaming me for getting you into this situation, it is the least I can do to provide you with resources and advice on how to review the submitted manuscript. So, in this article I will focus on questions to be answered and information to be gathered as you read the manuscript. In the next article in this series, I will discuss how to write the actual review. I want to emphasize that although I present here what I believe is a good approach, I encourage you to look at the advice of others in the list of references at the end, not only because these articles will complement the information that I present but also because you will find important commonalities on how to perform a fair and thorough review of a manuscript.

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Why is it important?

Knowing what to look for in each section of a paper when doing a peer review helps you organize the peer review, as well as your notes and thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the study. This article tells you what to look for in the Abstract, Introduction, Results, Discussion and all of the other sections of a scientific paper.