Although since the beginning of the year my style of peer review hasn’t changed much, I have noticed some significant characteristics of my peer review tendencies. Firstly, I tend to be more critical of the first peer paper from each set. I often provide less insight into what their paper is implying, and more suggestions for change. An example of which can be seen in the screenshot below (and is linked at the bottom), where I am critiquing a Discourse analysis paper. I provide less validation, and more criticism and suggestion. Later, however, I finally start to extrapolate on my peers’ ideas. Sadly, I believe that I was trying to be more encouraging in this process. However, looking back it is far more critical than I remember. I also noticed that my suggestions tend to be more focused around ideas, than around evidence, organization, or local suggestions. This may be because idea-oriented suggestions propose a more dramatic change to their paper. This is probably why I focused less on local commenting, because I figured that such smaller mistakes would be less important on the overall purpose of the paper. In the future, I should probably be less critical of my peer’s first drafts. However, I think my suggestions are helpful, so I would probably just change the way that I phrase them.
