teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

You will be asked to review before anyone teaches you how, and the default is to produce something either useless (“interesting paper, minor comments”) or destructive. Reviewing is also the fastest way to learn what editors are looking for, which makes you better at submitting. Do this one on a labmate’s Report Draft — it is real, it is at the right stage to still be fixable, and the reciprocal version of it is Response to reviewers.

External material

Elsevier’s reviewer guide or the Web of Science Academy reviewer course. Both cover the format and the ethics of reviewing. Neither covers being useful, which is the mechanic.

Governing part

None.

The mechanic

1. Summarise the paper in your own words, first, before criticising anything. If you cannot, that is finding number one and the most important thing in your report — it means the paper does not communicate its own contribution, and you should say so in exactly those terms.
2. Strengths, specific. “Well written” is not a strength. “The sensitivity analysis in §4.2 anticipates the obvious objection to the capacity assumption” is.
3. Weaknesses, tied to line numbers, and split into two lists: must fix and would improve. Conflating these is what makes reviews feel arbitrary — authors cannot tell what is blocking.
4. State a recommendation. Accept, minor revision, major revision, reject. A review that declines to recommend has pushed your job onto the editor.

Write it as though the author will read it, because they will, and they are sitting next to you.

Deliverable

Structured referee report as PDF: summary, strengths, weaknesses, recommendation.

Competency check

• Summary written in the reviewer’s own words
• At least two strengths, each pointing at a specific section
• At least two weaknesses, each tied to a line or section number
• Must-fix and would-improve separated into distinct lists
• An explicit recommendation

Turning it in

This replaces your reading entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WR assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: what you found that the author will not want to hear, and how you phrased it.
• You hand in: A PDF referee report: the paper summarised in your words, two or more specific strengths, two or more weaknesses with line numbers split into must-fix and would-improve, and an explicit recommendation

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M5 are done, submit the M5 — The Review Cycle assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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