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Writing an effective manuscript review: The 6 "Be's" to success.

In the previous article in this series (1), I provided pointers on what questions to consider and what information to gather to perform a fair and thorough evaluation of all sections of a manuscript. Once you have completed your evaluation of the entire manuscript and identified its strengths and weaknesses, the time arrives to put pen to paper (or keystrokes to computer screen) and actually create the peer review report that will go back to the editor and authors.

Unfortunately, peer reviewers cannot give, like Romans in the Colosseum, just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down or limit their responsibility to “yes” or “no.” As a peer reviewer, you must provide the criteria by which you judged the manuscript (i.e., documentation of its strengths and limitations). What you communicate to the authors and what you communicate to the editor will not be exactly the same, because these 2 stakeholders need different information and different types of feedback. Therefore, it is important as you write the manuscript review to understand that you are really writing 2 reports, although there may be overlap in what you convey to the editor and the author. Therefore, your review must be effective in giving each party the information they need. So, how do you write an effective peer manuscript review? In this article I hope to give you some pointers to achieve this goal. To help you remember what I consider the characteristics of an effective manuscript review, I have broken down the important points into the 6 “Be's” to success.

As a peer reviewer, you have 2 important roles. The first is to inform the authors about the strengths and weaknesses of the submitted paper and to suggest ways that the study could be or could have been improved (1). The second role is to recommend …