The Review: to encapsulate and quote, to comment and criticize

Abstract

A doctoral thesis should be seen as proof of research competence and the reviewer must ensure that the author has demonstrated the basic competence and knowledge that enables practice as an investigator and researcher. Based on this general requirement, I have examined two doctoral theses. The comments on my evaluation in the journal made me start to think about what it really means to do reviews. I have come to some conclusions which later became a very personal checklist which is discussed in this essay. I hope that this essay can provoke researchers to start writing reviews, either according to my checklist or according to a completely different one, or even write an angry text for a debate about how to write proper reviews for the academy.

Potentially, in this essay, I would like to argue for three aspects that I find particularly rewarding to bring into a peer-review: (i) to apply criteria of scientific fertility or creativity to the report; (ii) to investigate the degree of methodological objectivity of the research project; (iii) and finally to discuss the validity or viability of main ideas and concepts. This checklist for reviewers is hardly to be seen as complete nor exhaustive but it might hopefully encourage some new reviewers. The basic idea here is that the good review is built up of four constituent components: encapsulate, quote, comment and criticize and that three suggested topics are particularly rewarding to bring into the review: project viability, methodological objectivity and, most importantly, prime ideas.