What makes a review

Be realistic in what the authors can achieve in a revision. If your suggestion would mean they have to spend another year doing research before they can address your concern, it is not a helpful suggestion.

Of course, it might be needed to give the paper enough credibility to get published, but if it cannot be done in a reasonable time-frame, consider changing the direction you suggest the journal editor go with this paper. If your review report stretches over half of the word count of the paper itself, it is probably getting too detailed. The way reviewers express their comments has a huge influence on how they are perceived by the authors.

A good review report uses friendly and inclusive language. Show respect to the work and time the authors spent on the paper, even if you disagree with it. Your comments will be received better and are more likely to be addressed fully if you use a non-confrontational and non-patronising style.

The authors are your peers, and they deserve to be treated the way you would like to be treated. As authors, we value fair, friendly, and constructive judgements of our manuscripts. If you want to contribute to the quality-control process of published research in your field, make sure that the review reports that you produce for journals or others follow the characteristics described above.

Do you want to successfully write and publish a journal paper? If so, please sign up to receive our free guides. Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to footer Blog What makes a good review report? A good review report is … 1. Fair Most of all, a review report should be fair. Timely A review report should be delivered in a timely manner. Constructive A reviewer is not asked to write a damning review of the paper listing all the negative aspects that could be found.

Direct A good review report points out a potential outcome for the paper. Positive A good review report does not only point out weaknesses, but also highlights the good aspects of a manuscript.

Reasonable A good review report is reasonable in what it asks the authors to change. In a logistic regression analysis, the only significant factor associated with higher-quality ratings by both editors and authors was reviewers trained in epidemiology or statistics.

Younger age also was an independent predictor for editors' quality assessments, while reviews performed by reviewers who were members of an editorial board were rated of poorer quality by authors. Review quality increased with time spent on a review, up to 3 hours but not beyond.

Conclusions: The characteristics of reviewers we studied did not identify those who performed high-quality reviews.

Drawing on information processing theories and the related literature, we investigated the effects of a select set of review characteristics, including review length and readability, review valence, review extremity, and reviewer credibility on two outcomes—review voting and review helpfulness. We examined and analyzed a large set of review data from Amazon with the sample selection model. Our results indicate that there are systematic differences between voted and non-voted reviews, suggesting that helpful reviews with certain characteristics are more likely to be observed and identified in an online review system than reviews without the characteristics.

Furthermore, when review characteristics had opposite effects on the two outcomes i. Even when the effects on the two outcomes are in the same direction, ignoring the selection effects due to review voting would increase the risk of committing type II error that cannot be mitigated with a larger sample.

We discuss the implications of the findings on research and practice. Kuan, Kevin K.