How to review a paper

How to review a paper

Requires for writing a good review

1. Expertise in the field
2. An intimate knowledge of research methods
3. A critical mind
4. Ability to give fair and constructive feedback
5. Sensitivity to the feelings of authors

Once you’ve agreed to complete a review, how do you approach the paper?

1. Check what format the journal prefers the review to be in.
2. Are the background literature and study rationale clearly articulated?
3. Do the hypotheses follow logically from previous work?
4. Are the methods robust and well controlled?
5. Are the reported analyses appropriate?
6. Is the presentation of results clear and accessible?
7. it matters whether the hypothesis makes sense or is interesting
8. Could this methodology have answered their question?
9. Are schemes and figures well designed and organized?
10. whether all the important papers are cited in the references
11. whether the authors carefully designed and performed the experiments
12. whether they analyzed and interpreted the results in a comprehensible way
13. Are certain points under- or overrepresented
14. Does the theoretical argument make sense?
15. Does it contribute to our knowledge, or is it old wine in new bottles?
16. Is there an angle the authors have overlooked?
17. Are the methods suitable to investigate the research question and test the hypotheses?
18. Would there have been a better way to test these hypotheses or to analyze these results?
19. Is the research sound?

What further advice do you have for researchers who are new to the peer-review process?

1. The paper reviewing process can help you form your own scientific opinion and develop critical thinking skills.
2. It will also provide you with an overview of the new advances in the field and help you when writing and submitting your own articles.
3. A common mistake is writing an unfocused review that is lost in the details.
4. As a junior researcher, it may feel a little weird or daunting to critique someone's completed work. Just pretend that it's your own research and figure out what experiments you would do and how you would interpret the data.
5. one of the most dangerous traps a reviewer can fall into is failing to recognize and acknowledge their own bias.
6. Reading these can give you insights into how the other reviewers viewed the paper, and into how editors evaluate reviews and make decisions about rejection versus acceptance or revise and resubmit.

Format of review comments（personally）

1. A. Accept（例）
   The authors have made sufficient modifications according to the modification comments, and I suggest that this paper be accepted without further modification.

2. B. Reject（例）

   This paper proposes XXX. The work of this paper is clear and logical. However, I have to reject it because of the following problems:

   1. There are so many errors in the manuscript, such as, in page 1, ABSTRACT, XXX would be XXX.
   2. The method of this paper is not innovative enough. In fact, most of the work is done by combining other people’s methods. Authors need to highlight their innovative contributions.
   3. Another obvious problem with this paper is the lack of sufficient experimentation to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the proposed method. Too few experiments and too many hyperparameters make the conclusion of this paper lack persuasive.

3. C. Minor Changes/Major （例）

   1. There is at least one Spelling error in the manuscript, such as, in page 7, TABLE I, “Stabalization” would be “Stabilization”. Please check the manuscript carefully.
   2. The innovations in this paper focus on novel applications, and the methods and theoretical innovations are not sufficient. The author must dig deeper into the innovation points before the article can be accepted by XXX.
   3. Another obvious problem with this paper is the lack of enough experimentation to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the proposed method. The author needs to do more experiments with more angles and show them in this paper.
   4. For the problem of using of video information in the field of transportation, so many methods are proposed, such as, XXX, and, XXX. Perhaps the author can find inspiration by reading more literature in this field to further optimize this paper.

Focus

1. literature
2. Novelty
3. Experiment
4. reference

reference

Science magazine