Peer Review Practice Certification — Foundation

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1. Module 1

   F1

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.What a reviewer is asked to doLocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • State the three purposes commonly claimed for peer review — filtering, improvement, and advice to an editor — and explain how a review optimised for one becomes weaker at the others.
      • Distinguish an assessment of soundness from an assessment of significance, novelty and fit, and identify which a given venue's published reviewer guidance actually requests.
      • Identify, from a worked review, at least four judgements that belong to the editor rather than the reviewer.
      • Explain what peer review does not and cannot do, including that it is not a fraud detector and operates only on what was submitted.
      • Describe the principal anonymisation models and state what each changes about the reviewer's own conduct.
      • Recognise in a supplied review report the documented bias signatures — against unfamiliar institutions, non-native English prose, null results, replication, and unfamiliar author names — and rewrite the offending passages.
      • Decide whether to accept, decline, or accept with a stated competence limitation, given an invitation and an abstract.

2. Module 2

   F2

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.Reading a manuscript as a reviewerLocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • Reconstruct a paper's central claim in one sentence from the manuscript alone.
      • Map the inferential chain from data to claim and locate the weakest link.
      • Determine whether a study design is in principle capable of supporting the claim made, and distinguish that from bad execution of an adequate design.
      • Detect, in supplied manuscripts, each of: an unregistered outcome switch; multiplicity without adjustment or acknowledgement; a subgroup finding promoted to a headline; causal language on a non-causal design; a control that does not control for the thing at issue; and a conflation of statistical significance with importance.
      • Verify internal consistency between abstract, results, tables and figures, and report the discrepancies found.
      • Judge when specialist statistical review is required and state that requirement to an editor with reasons.
      • Evaluate whether a limitations section addresses the limitations that threaten the conclusion.

3. Module 3

   F3

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.Reporting guidelines as instrumentsLocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • Locate the appropriate reporting guideline for a given study design using the EQUATOR Network library.
      • Apply a guideline to a manuscript to identify reporting omissions.
      • Refuse to apply a guideline to a design it does not cover, and explain the refusal.
      • Distinguish a reporting deficiency from a methodological deficiency and classify each finding correctly in a review.
      • Explain why full compliance with a reporting guideline does not demonstrate quality.
      • Compare a protocol, a registration and a report, and frame a discrepancy as a question rather than as a finding of misconduct.

4. Module 4

   F4

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.Writing the review reportLocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • Construct a review report in a defensible structure: neutral summary, major points, minor points, confidential comments to the editor.
      • Classify each criticism as major or minor against a stated test — whether the conclusion stands without it — and defend the classification.
      • Rewrite a vague criticism into an actionable one specifying what is wrong, where, why it matters, and what would resolve it.
      • Compose confidential comments to the editor that carry the recommendation, the reviewer's confidence, competence limits, and any unevidenced concern — without withholding substantive criticism the author needs.
      • Detect and eliminate contradictions between the comments to the author and the comments to the editor.
      • Revise a hostile or personalised review into one that addresses the manuscript, without weakening any substantive point.
      • Produce a recommendation consistent with the content of the review, and explain why a recommendation is advice rather than a vote.
      • Review a revision against the prior round, distinguishing responses that address a point from responses that evade it, and justify any new major point raised at the second round.

5. Module 5

   F5

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.Confidentiality, conflicts, and generative AILocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • State the scope of the confidentiality obligation attaching to a manuscript under review, including its duration and its survival of rejection, withdrawal or publication elsewhere.
      • Explain, without reference to any specific policy, why uploading a manuscript or application under review to a third-party generative-AI service breaches reviewer confidentiality.
      • Distinguish that prohibited use from defensible use of tooling that processes confidential text on infrastructure the reviewer or venue controls, or that the venue has expressly sanctioned.
      • Apply a structured conflict-of-interest test to eight scenarios and decide in each case between declining, disclosing and proceeding, and proceeding without disclosure.
      • Justify disclosure-and-let-the-editor-decide as the default in every ambiguous case.
      • Identify misuse of the reviewer position — citation coercion, delay of a competitor, appropriation of ideas or material — and describe the correct action when a manuscript under review is close to the reviewer's own unpublished work.
      • Describe the disclosure obligation attaching to co-review with a colleague or trainee.

6. Module 6

   F6

   1 lesson

   1. Locked.Integrity signals and what to do about themLocked

      On completion you will be able to

      • On completion the learner can:
      • Identify in a supplied figure set the visual signatures of image duplication and manipulation, and separate them from compression artefacts, disclosed representative-image reuse, and honest assembly error.
      • Recognise implausible or over-clean data, including values arithmetically impossible for the stated sample size and scale.
      • Identify paper-mill signatures — tortured phrases, irrelevant or cartel citations, scope mismatch, template structure, unexplained authorship changes — and weigh them cumulatively rather than individually.
      • Classify a data or code availability statement as genuinely open, conditionally available, available-on-request, or effectively unavailable, and verify a stated accession or repository record by following it.
      • Compose an escalation note to the editor that is factual, specific, located in the manuscript, and explicitly non-conclusory.
      • State the actions a reviewer must not take: contacting the author, posting publicly, circulating the manuscript for a second opinion without the editor's agreement, and naming an individual as responsible.