Everyone in academia knows Reviewer 2. You ‘ve probably received their comments. You may even in a dark moment, have been them. This post is a practical guide to achieving full Reviewer 2 status. It’s offered in the spirit of knowing your enemy.

Reviewer 2 has an attitude. Even before they have read the abstract, even before they have looked at the data or followed the argument, they know what they are going to recommend. Rejection, or something close to it.

The reviewing task is actually pretty straightforward.  You see, Reviewer 2 doesn’t read the paper. They read at it. They form a view, and spend the rest of the manuscript looking for confirmation. This is efficient. It saves time. And it produces feedback that might bear only a tangential relationship to what the author actually wrote. But no matter. If you want to be Reviewer 2, practice this selective attention. You know the position to take. Right from the very start you must critique, not appreciate. Then you just have to gather the evidence for a rejection or major revisions, 

As Reviewer 2 you read the paper looking for what it does not do. You are not primarily interested in what it does. Now, this is surprisingly easy. No paper does everything. Every study has a scope, a sample and a set of questions it chose to ask and a longer list of possible things that were set aside. Reviewer 2 loves a longer list. It’s so easy to say “The paper does not address X. It fails to engage with Y. It overlooks Z entirely. There aren’t definitions for A, B and C” Even though these omissions were often deliberate and explained, or reasonable given the research design, or the paper refers out to a place where you can find all the details, you assess the paper for what is not there.  And absence is soooo easy to find.

The methodology section deserves special treatment. As Reviewer 2  you should always find it inadequate.  You’re not looking to understand what the researcher did and why, but to locate the gaps between this study and some other study, the ideal one, one which used a different paradigm. (It’s probably the one you would have designed). The sample is too small, or too large and therefore superficial, or drawn from the wrong population, or described in too much detail when you wanted less, or in too little detail when you wanted more. The point is not to engage with what the researcher actually did and why. The point is to invoke a different study and hold the submitted paper against that imaginary standard. This is very effective. The author cannot respond to a study that does not exist.

Citations are your other great resource. Reviewer 2 and their friends are almost always missing from the reference list. This is an oversight that must be corrected. You should recommend three to five papers that speak directly to the topic.  It is purely coincidental that two of them have your name on them. Frame this as a gap in the literature review. Do not explain what these papers contribute or how they would strengthen the argument. The author can work that out. Your job is to note the absence.

Tone is important. Reviewer 2 writes as if the paper has tired them out. “The author seems unaware of” is a reliable construction. So is “this is well-trodden ground,” deployed regardless of how recently the ground was last trodden. The rhetorical question works well: “But what does this actually tell us about practice?” That’s not a genuine question by the way. It’s a weary sigh formatted as inquiry.

Your recommendation should not quite match the substance of the review. If you have identified what sound like fundamental problems, you can recommend major revisions rather than rejection, because this keeps the paper in play long enough to demoralise the author across multiple rounds. But you can of course reject it outright and note that the work is not ready for publication in this journal.

The reason Reviewer 2 persists is that sometimes there really is a problem with the sample or an argument or the literature. Sometimes a theoretical framework does need more development. Reviewer 2 survives because their criticisms sometimes do find something real, even when their concerns were written without care. This is what makes their feedback so difficult to dismiss and so exhausting to receive – writers cannot always tell which objections matter.

Good reviewing of course starts from the opposite position. Reviewer 1 reads to understand what the paper is trying to do before assessing how well it does it. R1 engages with the methodology on its own terms, which means asking whether the choices made were reasonable for these research questions and paradigm, not whether they would have made different ones. When R1 identifies an issue, they say precisely where it is and why it matters for this argument, not just that it exists. They recommend papers to help, not because they wrote them or their mates did or they are out there and they are their favourites. And R1writes in a register that acknowledges an actual person did this research and wrote this paper and will have all the feelings about whatever is said.

The anonymity of peer review is at issue here. Peer review can produce honest generosity, the kind that is straightforward because there is no social cost to being fair. It can also provide the freedom to be dismissive, even rude, without consequences. Reviewer 2 is what happens when a reviewer chooses the second option and mistakes it for high standards.

The test of good peer review is whether the reading and comments helped the author understand what the paper is doing and what it still needs. That requires reading the paper that has been sent, which is where Reviewer 2 is always unwilling to start.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash