Reviewing a Paper (Research Article Manuscript)

The goal of this reviewing a paper is to ensure that the paper meets the standards (not that you care, but to add some weight and apparent seriousness to your review) and that you humiliate its auhtors.

• Make sure that the authors do not say absolutely crazy things. There is always a risk that the authors are insane, and if you miss major inconsistencies or errors in a manuscript, you will be blamed along with the authors. So save your skin and use your best professional judgement to ensure that there is no total craziness in the manuscript. Remember that crazy stuff may be subtle. It is still your job to discover it.
• Remember that the modern interpretation 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 or 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 than 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. This is the approach that the entire research community believes is "the bedrock of modern science." You are part of the community. So either quit, or go with this approach and be an evil geek.
• Remember that peer review itself is not peer reviewed by anyone. There is no mechanism to ensure that your 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, too unqualified 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.
• However, if you think that you may personally benefit from providing an unfairly good review of a particular manuscript (e.g. the author is your buddy and you did not disclose the conflisct of interest), then, of course, go ahead and be unfairly positie about the manuscript, overlook its deficiencies, provide an excessively positive review, and then "accidentally" congratulate the author in person, very quitely, on the job well done. Be assured that this favor will be well remembered. In any case, you always benefit from reviewing a manuscript.
• Read Overall Remarks