Some important pointers

• Why bother with peer review? Most things in life begin with noble intentions and end up becoming corrupted. Long ago, peer review was initiated as a practice to ensure high quality of scientific manuscripts, to help the authors further improve their works, and to prevent scientific misconduct. That initial naive effort was propelled by enthusiasm of a few insipred dorks. They have since passed away many many years ago. Now days, science is politics. Your reason for being in science is to show the world that you are smart and successful, may be even a genius, and everyone else is inferior to you. Be real, acknowledge that this is the case, and now stick with the truth. There are ways to achieve your goal:
  • Discourage and humiliate others, deny giving them credit for their efforts or achievements
  • Be explicit in telling everyone how great you are
  • Conducting a peer review provides a great opportunity to practice both of these activities
• Should I accept an invitation to peer review a research manuscript or a grant application? Absolutely positively YES! You should accomodate as many requests for peer review as you possibly can. There are two equally important reasons for that.
  • One, conducting and submitting a review provides an excellent opportunity to discourage and humiliate the authors of the manuscript. By telling the authors how bad their work is, you will make yourself feel good, because after you detail all of their problems you will feel that you might be better, or at least not worse, than the authors are. Admit to yourself that your colleagues scientists as well as yourself are driven essentially by the notion of self-grandeur, and therefore by intolerance of colleagues who are always viewed as competitotrs. As a true scientist, you must accept every invitation for a peer-review, and use it to humiliate others who are just like yourself. If not for dissing of the authors of the manuscript, the other reason for reviewing would be that one of the authors is your buddy, you do not disclose the conflict of interests or cheat yourself into believeing that there is not conflict, then provide an unfairly good review and "accidentally" let the author know that you did him/her a favor.
  • Two, reviewing allows you to add this activity to your CV and thus shows everyone what an important person you are; after all, if they ask for your opinion, it must mean that you are an expert in at least something.
• Should I review only within my area of expertise? The answer is, it depends. As a general rule, review the research article manuscripts outside your area of expertise, but decline to review grant proposal outside your area of expertise.
  • Reviewing research article manuscripts outside your area of expertise is OK, because the peer review itself is not peer reviewed by anyone. There is no mechanism to ensure that peer review is fair. There is no legal mechanism to punish you for an incompetent or prejudicious review. The journal editors or funding agencies who ask you for a review are too busy, too lazy, and even afraid to argue with you about the quality of your review. You can always say, hey, you asked for my opinion and I am giving it to you, what else do you want. An important consequence of this point is that you often do not even need to read the manuscript. Just glance over it and start dissing. Try to avoid major basic mistakes that might reveal your incompetence; e.g. keep in mind preservation of mass and energy, impossibility of perpetuum mobile, the lowest possible temperature, etc. Other than that, everything goes as to being prejudicious, offensive, unfair, and humilitating to the authors of the manuscript that is being reviewed. Importantly, there is no need to pay attention to details of the work, unless you use them to diss the whole study.
  • Reviewing grant proposals outside your area of expertise is dangerous. If you are not an expert on the subject of the grant, your ignorance will likely become obvious during the study section meeting where all of the grants are reviewed by the panel of experts.Those guys will likely discover that you are a fraud, and that can be very harmful to your reputation.
• Are there limits to how unfair I can be in my review? No. Everything goes in dissing the study, the authors, their good intentions, their inspirations, their noble causes, unless you are personally interested in benefiting from providing an unfairly good review of a specific manuscript for the authors who happen to be your buddies or whoes ass you may want to kiss. So if the authors promote a novel concept in their manuscript, say that the rest of the community does not share this view, that there is no consensus on the subject, and that the data in support of this pretentious idea are no convincing. If they do not come up with a novel concept or mechanism or approach but provide novel data using within the tradtional conceptual or methodological frame, then say that this is a simple repetition of some previously reported observations and that this work adds little if anything to the existing body of knowledge.
  • Importantly, remember that the whole idea of peer-review is unnatural and immoral. There is no true limit to what journals can publish, because there is plenty of paper around, plus most of the journals are now on-line, and there is no limit whatsoever to how much information the Internet can hold. Ideally, peer-review should only ensure that there is no obvious fraud and obvious glaring errors in a research paper manuscript. Other than that, why not let the paper out and allow the rest of the world to be peer-reviewers. If they do not want to read it or do not like it, have them express their opinions online or just ignore the paper. There is no higher authority that the global readership. What we do now is substitute the global readership with one to three, rarely up to five, evil geeks that we call "experts" and allow them to tear the manuscript apart, thus preventing the rest of the world from seeing possibly important work. Such pattern of behaviour is highly immoral, and driven only by human tendency to act within the master-slave mindset.
  • Grant proposal peer-review process is even more unnatural, because any opinion is subjective, especially an opinion of a small crowd (crwod psychology, you know, such as in a study section or ina peer-review panel that are usually controlled by a leader or two with strong personalities), only in this case, the fight is not for the journal space but for real money. Such reviews have even less to do with scientific fairness, and anyone who had their grants reviewed knows that.
  • Therefore, who are you to change this pattern. By simply being a modern scientists within the current scintific enterprise you have already become an immoral person. So you better be a good one, and do peer-review in the most unfair fashion possible, unfairly destroying people you do not know or do not like, and unfairly benefiting those that you know, like, or kiss up to.