A peer review template
It is not often taught at universities, even on graduate-level programs, how to write a peer review. I googled around and based on different sources (links provided below) I collected a set of questions to fill each paragraph of a review.
Before writing a review, here is a guide How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav from the University of Waterloo that I follow when reading a paper (it is useful for a literature study as well). Long story short, there are three passes of increasing level of detail. After the first pass, which takes up to 15 minutes, you should be able to decide whether you are capable of serving as a reviewer for a given manuscript.
Here are the questions that I answer to fill each paragraph:
- Brief summary
- A brief summary of the article and its contribution.
- State what you think the contributions are.
- Structure
- Is the article well-written and easy to understand?
- Could it be made clearer?
- Is the article well-organized?
- Does the article contain all of the components you would expect (Introduction, Background, Related Work, Methods, Results, Conclusions, Discussion)?
- Are the sections well-developed?
- General comments regarding layout and format, title, abstract, figures and tables.
- Novelty
- What’s new about the work?
- Does the author do a good job of synthesizing the literature?
- Is there some related work that the authors have missed?
- Does the related work invalidate the contribution, or (more likely) simply change its context or emphasis?
- Criticism of methodology
- Is the methodology clearly explained?
- Are there gaps or unaddressed issues?
- Are there any apparent technical flaws?
- Criticism of results
- Does the theory connect to the data?
- Are you convinced by the author’s results? Why or why not?
- Does the author answer the questions he/she sets out to answer?
- Strong points
- Was there anything you thought was really cool about the paper?
- Conclusion
- Give a brief recommendation for the paper and your reasons for it.