Peer Reviewers Editing and Proofreading Services

You spend four hours on a review and write eleven hundred words. The author reads them, cannot tell which three things they must fix and which eight are your preferences, and responds to all eleven with equal seriousness — adding two thousand words to a paper that needed a corrected analysis. Your review was careful and generous. It was also, as an instrument for improving the paper, badly built.

We work on what reviewers write — review reports for journals and conferences, comments to the editor and comments to the author, structured review forms and their narrative sections, recommendations and their justification, reviews of revised manuscripts, grant and fellowship reviews, book and monograph proposal reviews, reviewer responses to author rebuttals, and reviews written for interdisciplinary or unfamiliar work. Our editors work on the report an author has to act on.

The review report is where peer review either improves a paper or generates work, and its failure is a flat list. Everything in an unranked review carries the same weight, and the author's time goes to whatever is easiest. We work through these so the report opens with the two or three things that determine whether the paper is publishable, stated as required, since this is the only part the author must not misunderstand; so the remainder is explicitly labelled as suggestions the author may decline, and the review says so, because a reviewer who distinguishes them is a reviewer whose required points get taken seriously; so each required point names what would satisfy it — the analysis to run, the limitation to state, the claim to soften — as a criticism without a remedy leaves the author guessing at what would be enough; so anything the reviewer cannot assess is declared rather than glossed, given that a review that pretends to competence across the whole paper is less useful than one that says the statistics are outside my expertise; so the tone addresses the work rather than the authors, since a review that reads as contempt gets appealed rather than implemented; so the confidential comments to the editor say what the reviewer cannot say to the author and nothing that should have been said to them; and so the recommendation matches the substance of the review. Reviews written this way improve papers, which is the only reason to write them.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts under review, reports and editorial correspondence. We are editors rather than subject reviewers, and we offer no view on the science, the merits or the recommendation. What we can do is make the report tell an author what to do first.