Peer review, for all its flaws, is a special part of science. Most other industries, commerce, and practices around the world don’t have a system in place to provide anonymous, hopefully constructive, feedback on the key output of your work. During my Ph.D. I didn’t put much thought into the process much beyond “How can I address potential issues a reviewer might have before submission?”. I was happy to review the work of my friends and colleagues and in a couple cases got to contribute to the peer review of unpublished papers on behalf of my advisors when the subject intersected my studies. Recently, I received a request to conduct a peer review for something I had experience in, unlike last one which discussed dairy manure management. Now graduated and considered a full peer in the process I had to think about how I would approach the review.
Reviewer effort shows during revisions
Before accepting I thought back to the reviews I have received. One thing I knew was that I wanted it to be clear that I read the paper, the whole paper, and could understand enough of it to provide useful comments on its contents to the authors. You wouldn’t think this necessary, but here’s some personal examples: A reviewer who complains that CEA was not properly defined when it was in italics and bolded in the first paragraph; One who just says great job with a few minor comments and summary that shows they completely missed the main point of the paper; a review riddled with grammatical errors and misspellings that insisted we hire an editor without providing any examples why that was needed; and the worst of all, one who just fed it to a LLM, and pasted the output without checking for any of the many mistakes it made which we then had to dispute point by point. To do better than these reviewers would require reading thoroughly and carefully, and that takes some time.
To review or not review
Completing a review takes up limited working time or treasured personal time. Depending on the complexity of the paper and the depth at which I want to review it, it could take up to a full day of work or longer. Meanwhile, I currently have a manuscript for my job and three from my Ph.D. that I could be working on. Aside from taking time away from my manuscripts in need I had to consider what I could potentially gain. Often it is nothing tangible beyond knowing you contributed to science, but according to the editors’ email for this review I could get some documented recognition and receive a roughly $50 – $100 voucher towards future publication costs for that publisher. Granted for me to pay for an open access article would require completing 15 – 20+ reviews, likely equating to some sad hourly rate I’d rather not calculate. As I believe that peer review is an important part of science and was going to be getting more than warm fuzzy feelings for my time, I happily agreed to the review.
Structuring the review
I didn’t look up any format for my review. I simply did what I found useful from reviews I had received. All the best ones started off the same way, with a summary from the reviewer that covered the goal of the paper, methods used, key results and perhaps a few of the discussion points. Done right, the recipient can quickly tell that you read and understood the paper, giving the impression that the revisions requested are going to help make the paper better. I also preferred it when reviewers, particularly if they had a lot to say, structured the revisions a bit. To do this as I read the paper, I wrote down all my comments and split them into three main sections, major, minor, and grammar. Major being anything that required significant changes to the presentation of material or potentially misinterpreted results. Minor being low hanging fruit that could be addressed to improve the overall quality of the manuscript like fixing confusing sentences. The grammar section naturally consists of grammatical mistakes that could be addressed quickly. Ideally this allows the recipient to quickly identify what major issues, if any, need to be addressed and how best to address them without those points getting buried and lost in the middle of minor and grammatical revisions.
Conclusion
While I’d love to go on and provide some details on the kinds of things I looked for, and what I found, it’s hard to say more without divulging details of the paper which are supposed to be confidential, so I’ll stop there.
Peer review brings up a lot of mixed feelings and thoughts in scientists. Some rebel against it for being another way for publishers to profit from unpaid labor, while others simply accept it and move on. Some believe it is a fundamental instrument to create better publications and others find the process laughable at stopping bad science. Some find it a worthwhile exercise and others find it to be a tedious waste of time. These potential perspectives, just like my approach, are not inherently right or wrong. Maybe someone will read this and decide to adopt a part of it, maybe they’ll decide they can do better. Either way, when able, I’m happy to be a peer that contributes to the larger community that makes scientific progress possible.
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©Donald Coon 2026 available at
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Donald S. Coon 