Review Someone Else's Manuscript
A referee report answers one question for the editor: is each claim carried by the evidence offered for it, and if not, what would carry it. Everything else in the report serves that question.
The manuscript is confidential and belongs to its authors. That constraint shapes what you may do with it before it shapes what you write.
Select one mode
| Mode | Responsibility | Read first |
|---|---|---|
initial-review | First-round report on a new submission | references/claim-evidence-review.md |
revision-round | Check the response letter against the actual changes | references/revision-round.md |
editorial-prescreen | Scope, fit and policy compliance before peer review | references/prescreen.md |
confidentiality | Establish what may be done with the manuscript at all | references/confidentiality.md |
Read confidentiality before opening the manuscript in any tool. It constrains the other
three modes rather than following them.
Resolve the installed skill and components
Resolve SKILL_DIR as the directory containing this SKILL.md. Every runtime resource
is below that directory; never resolve through a package parent.
The confidentiality boundary
A manuscript under review is unpublished, non-public work shared with you for one purpose. Do not redistribute it, do not quote it outside the report, do not use its results in your own work before publication, and do not paste it into a service that retains submissions unless the journal's own policy permits that service by name.
Declare a competing interest and decline where one exists. Reviewing a direct competitor's submission while working on the same problem is a conflict even when you intend to be fair, and the intention is not the test.
If you delegate any part of the reading, the confidentiality obligation travels with the text. Whoever reads it is bound by the same terms, and the journal's policy decides whether that delegation is permitted at all.
Structure a report the editor can act on
Separate three things and never merge them.
Claims and their support. Take each claim the authors make and find the evidence offered. Report the ones where the claim is broader than the support, naming the location of both. This section is the report.
Defects. Problems that make a reported result unsafe: a leaked split, an undefined metric, a comparator that was not given a fair budget, an independence assumption the design violates, a statistical test whose assumptions the data breaks. State the consequence, not only the deviation.
Requests. What would resolve each point. A request must be executable by the authors with material they plausibly have. "Run a larger study" is not a request; "report the per-site breakdown that the aggregate in Table 2 was computed from" is.
Calibrate the severity
| Severity | Test |
|---|---|
| Fatal | The result would not survive the correction |
| Major | The result probably survives, but the paper cannot be judged until it is shown |
| Minor | The claim is unaffected; the presentation misleads |
| Taste | You would have done it differently and the paper is not worse for it |
Taste-level points belong in a short final paragraph or nowhere. Presenting them at major severity is the most common way a report becomes unusable to an editor.
Write for two readers
The editor needs a recommendation and the two or three points it rests on, near the top. The authors need every point located and actionable. Write the report so that both are served without a private section that contradicts the public one.
Boundaries
This skill drafts a report; it does not decide acceptance and does not audit an author's raw data. It does not rehearse objections against your own manuscript, and it does not carry any individual's personal reviewing voice: the method is the transferable part.
