Tips and tricks for writing constructive peer reviews

Conservation Physiology

December 13, 2025

Jeff C Clements, Steven J Cooke, Sean Tomlinson, Bridget O'Boyle, Andrea Fuller

"Peer review has been the cornerstone of scientific inquiry for centuries and is considered the backbone of scientific quality and rigour (Spier, 2002). Despite its importance to the scientific process, peer review suffers from a variety of issues that undermine objectivity and impartiality, and act as a disservice to both science as an institution and the scientists that engage in it (Smith, 2006; Proctor et al., 2023; Candal-Pedreira et al., 2024). Furthermore, issues with peer review can drive public mistrust of science (Cooke et al., 2024).



One issue that has received much attention in contemporary discussions on peer review is poor reviewer etiquette. By default, peer review is an interpersonal enterprise and relies on written communication between authors and reviewers, with reviewers providing critical appraisal of research conducted by the authors. Unfortunately, the nature of this relationship provides for an environment where written evaluations of scientific works can present as unconstructive, harsh or downright mean. Indeed, some peer reviewers feel that harshness is justified to prevent the publication of poor-quality science (Gerwing et al., 2021)."

How chasing a high-impact publication nearly broke me

Science

January 22, 2026

Zvonimir Marelja

"When a paper I had spent years working on tirelessly was published in Science, others expected me to be happy. One senior scientist immediately urged me to work on securing my own funding for a follow-up project and added, “If you want to become a PI [principal investigator], you now have to give 150%.” The advice was well-meaning; in his view, the Science publication was a step toward a job leading a lab. But it wasn’t clear how I would find the energy to keep going. After 8 years pouring myself into one postdoc project and submitting to Nature and Science, I barely had 50% left.



Years earlier, when I moved to France to start the project, I was full of enthusiasm and happy to work long hours. But as time went on and I struggled to get my project off the ground, pressure and insecurity became my main motivators. If I failed, I feared I would never get a job in academia.

Haunted by low self-esteem, I put pressure on myself to work harder and felt guilty whenever I took a break. Weekends disappeared into experiments, vacations shrank to a few days, and my mind no longer knew how to rest."