// the find
jtleek/reviews
Writing reviews of academic papers
A single markdown document (plus an R Markdown template) from Jeff Leek describing how members of his academic lab should write peer reviews. It's aimed at graduate students who've never been taught the mechanics of reviewing — structure, tone, length, and when to reject versus ask for revisions.
The advice on reviewer jerk behavior is unusually direct and useful — the point about never asking for major revisions on a paper you'd reject anyway is something most reviewers learn the hard way. The structure (comments to authors / comments to editor / recommendation) maps cleanly to what journals actually ask for. The length guidance ('1-2 pages, bullet pointed') pushes back against the academic habit of padding reviews to signal expertise. The re-review decision tree is genuinely practical.
This is a 500-word README with one template file — it's a blog post that got a GitHub repo. Last touched in 2015, which predates major shifts in open-access review norms and preprint culture. There's no tooling, no schema, no structured data — nothing a developer would actually use or integrate. The R Markdown template adds almost nothing beyond the README itself.