Journal Reviewer

A journal reviewer (also called a peer reviewer or referee) is a subject-matter expert an editor invites, from outside the journal's own staff, to independently evaluate a submitted manuscript's validity, originality, significance, and clarity, then report a written assessment and a recommendation — accept, revise, or reject — back to the editor who requested it. Someone is a journal reviewer only while performing this evaluator role for a specific editor and a specific submission: it is a per-manuscript assignment, not a standing staff position, an authorship credit, or publication-decision authority in its own right.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 17 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A biology journal's editor, working from the submission system's expertise index, invites two subject-matter experts with no institutional or co-authorship ties to the submitting team to serve as journal reviewers for a manuscript; each independently returns a written report evaluating methodology, originality, and clarity before the editor decides.

Is an instance

A researcher who has recently published in a given subfield accepts a journal's invitation to review a manuscript, first checking they have no financial, intellectual, or personal conflict of interest per COPE's guidelines, then submits comments to the editor within the requested timeframe while keeping the manuscript's contents confidential throughout and after the review.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

An editor who reads a submission to decide whether it merits being sent out for external review is not, in that act, acting as a journal reviewer — that initial editorial triage is an editorial function, not the independent expert evaluation a journal reviewer is specifically invited to perform, even though it involves reading and assessing the same manuscript.

Not an instance

A colleague who informally reads a nearly-finished draft and gives the author feedback before submission is not a journal reviewer: that is pre-submission collegial feedback given directly to the author, outside any journal's formal editorial process. A journal reviewer is invited by an editor (or an editorial system acting on the editor's behalf) to assess a manuscript already inside a specific journal's review workflow, and reports back to that editor, not to the author.

Journal reviewers sit between authors and editors in the standard peer-review workflow. An editor decides a submission merits external, expert evaluation, invites one or more journal reviewers to assess it, and the reviewer’s formal output — a written report and a recommendation — goes back to that editor, not to the author directly and not into the published record. The reviewer does not decide whether the manuscript is published; that authority stays with the editor.

How reviewers are selected and invited

Per ICMJE’s “Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process,” selecting appropriate reviewers — and making sure they can access everything relevant to evaluating the manuscript — is the editor’s responsibility, not the author’s and not a fully automated process. In practice, editors draw on several overlapping channels: their own knowledge of active researchers in the manuscript’s subfield, the journal’s own reviewer database, keyword/expertise matching built into the submission system (ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, and similar platforms), reviewers suggested by the submitting authors (subject to the editor’s independent vetting, precisely because an author-suggested reviewer carries an obvious conflict-of-interest risk), and self-nominated or volunteer reviewer pools some journals maintain. COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers frame taking up reviewing as a professional responsibility that follows from having benefited from being reviewed, not a single fixed application path — some journals require formal appointment to a review panel or a demonstrated area of expertise, and expect accurate personal and professional information from anyone accepting an invitation. A reviewer should only agree if they genuinely have the relevant expertise and can render an unbiased assessment, and should flag any gap in their expertise to the editor rather than review outside it.

Typical review criteria

What a journal reviewer is actually asked to judge varies by journal and by manuscript type, but most review criteria cluster around the same handful of questions: is the methodology sound and are the conclusions supported by the data (validity); has this been done before, and if so, is the contribution here genuinely new (originality); does the work matter enough to the field to justify publication (significance); and is the manuscript clearly written and adequately situated against prior literature (clarity). Many journals formalize these into a structured review form or rubric, and discipline-specific submissions add further checks — ethical approvals and consent statements for human- or animal-subject research, data and code availability, statistical reporting adequacy, and reproducibility of reported methods. Note that ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023, Standard Terminology for Peer Review, does not standardize review criteria themselves; it standardizes how a journal describes its review model — identity transparency, who the reviewer interacts with, what review information is published, and whether post-publication commenting is enabled — a related but distinct piece of controlled vocabulary (see CASRAI’s ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 entry).

Conflict-of-interest and confidentiality expectations

Both COPE and ICMJE set out reviewer obligations in detail. COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers (Version 2, September 2017) require a reviewer to declare all competing interests — personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political, or religious — before accepting an invitation, and to decline if they are currently at the same institution as an author or have been a close collaborator, mentor, mentee, or joint grant holder with an author within roughly the past three years. On confidentiality, COPE requires reviewers to keep the manuscript and its contents strictly confidential throughout and after the review, never to use unpublished ideas or data from it for their own purposes before the work is published, and never to involve anyone else — including a trainee or mentee — in the review without the editor’s explicit permission. ICMJE’s parallel guidance is consistent: editors must not share information about a manuscript with anyone besides its own authors and reviewers, and reviewers “must keep manuscripts they are asked to review confidential” and disclose competing interests that could bias their assessment. Both bodies also flag a specific, named form of reviewer misconduct: suggesting that authors cite the reviewer’s own work without a genuine academic reason for doing so.

How the reviewer role differs from an editor’s

A journal reviewer’s contribution is advisory, not decisive. ICMJE states this in unambiguous terms: “a peer-reviewed journal is under no obligation to follow reviewer recommendations” — the editor makes the final accept, revise, or reject decision and can diverge from what any individual reviewer, or even a majority of reviewers, advised. The editor also carries responsibilities no reviewer holds: selecting and inviting reviewers in the first place, resolving disagreement between reviewers who reach conflicting conclusions, managing the manuscript and correspondence throughout the submission’s life at the journal, and communicating the decision — with or without reviewer comments attached — back to the authors. A reviewer’s formal role begins and ends with the manuscripts they are specifically invited to assess; it is not a standing editorial position, and it carries no authorship credit or publication-decision authority in its own right.

For the full practical path into and through the role — how invitations actually reach a prospective reviewer, typical turnaround expectations, and reviewer-recognition infrastructure like ORCID’s Peer Review record — see CASRAI’s guide, Peer Reviewer: Role, Responsibilities, and How to Become One. For how the review stage fits into the broader editorial and submission process, see CASRAI’s What Is Peer Review? guide. For a side-by-side look at how identity-transparency choices (who knows whose name, and when) change what a review looks like in practice, see CASRAI’s single-blind vs double-blind vs open peer review comparison.

References

COPE Council, Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, Version 2 (September 2017)
ICMJE, “Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process,” Roles and Responsibilities
NISO, ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023, Standard Terminology for Peer Review (July 5, 2023)

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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