Reviewer Report: A Worked Example

On this page: a complete, clearly-labeled illustrative example of a full peer review report for a submitted manuscript — the summary/overview section, numbered major and minor comments, confidential comments to the editor, and a recommendation — assembled as one document the way a reviewer would actually submit it.

Illustrative composite example. The manuscript details and review text below are synthesized, invented content written to demonstrate structure and tone. They are not quoted from, or attributed to, any real manuscript, journal, editor, or reviewer. Any resemblance to a specific published review is coincidental — treat it as a template, not a transcript.

How this differs from CASRAI’s other reviewer-comments resources

CASRAI already has three related pages, and it’s worth being precise about how this one is different before reading further:

Reviewer Guidelines: What to Look For, How to Structure Comments, and Common Mistakes explains the craft — what to evaluate section by section, how a report is typically structured, and the recurring mistakes that make a review harder to act on. It does not show a complete assembled report.
Reviewer Comments to Author: Worked Examples and How to Respond shows three isolated reviewer-comment-and-author-response pairs, written from the perspective of an author drafting a point-by-point rebuttal at the revision stage.
Reviewer Comments on a Rejected Manuscript: A Worked Example shows an editor’s decision letter plus brief reviewer excerpts specific to a reject outcome, and focuses on what an author does next.

This page is the one none of those three are: a single, complete reviewer report as a reviewer would actually write and submit it — from the summary paragraph through to the recommendation — for a manuscript still under first-round consideration, not yet decided.

What a complete reviewer report typically contains

Most editorial systems expect some version of the same shape, whether or not the submission form labels each part explicitly. This worked example follows the structure CASRAI’s Reviewer Guidelines describes in detail:

A short summary. One paragraph, in the reviewer’s own words, describing what the manuscript reports and its overall contribution.
Major comments. Numbered, substantive issues that affect whether the paper’s conclusions are supported — methodological gaps, missing controls, claims the data don’t support.
Minor comments. Numbered, smaller issues — unclear phrasing, formatting, suggestions that would improve but not fix the paper.
Confidential comments to the editor. Context the editor needs but the authors don’t see.
A recommendation. Under the terminology formalized in ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023, most journals resolve editorial decisions into a small set of outcomes — commonly accept, minor revision, major revision, and reject. As CASRAI’s Reviewer Guidelines notes, ICMJE is explicit that a journal is under no obligation to follow a reviewer’s recommendation; the recommendation communicates the reviewer’s judgment, it doesn’t make the decision.

Worked example: full reviewer report

Illustrative composite — not a real manuscript.

Manuscript ID: [Journal name]-2026-00142 | Title: “[Working title of manuscript]” | Reviewer: Reviewer 2

Summary

This manuscript reports a randomized comparison of two coaching interventions for early-career researchers on grant-proposal writing outcomes, using a pre-registered protocol and a sample of 96 participants across three institutions. The authors find a modest but statistically significant improvement in reviewer-rated proposal quality for the structured-feedback arm relative to the self-guided arm, and argue this supports wider institutional adoption of structured feedback models. The research question is well-motivated and the pre-registration is a genuine strength. My main concerns, detailed below, relate to how attrition was handled and whether the effect size reported justifies the strength of the adoption recommendation in the Discussion.

Major comments

Attrition is not adequately addressed (Methods, p. 6; Results, p. 9). 18 of 96 participants (18.75%) did not complete the post-intervention assessment, and attrition appears higher in the self-guided arm (14%) than the structured-feedback arm (5%) based on Table 1, but this difference is not tested or discussed. Differential attrition of this size could plausibly explain part of the reported effect if it’s related to engagement with the intervention itself. Please report whether attrition differed significantly by arm, and add a sensitivity analysis (e.g., worst-case imputation) showing the result holds under a conservative assumption about the missing outcomes.
The effect size does not clearly support the strength of the adoption claim (Discussion, p. 12, lines 244–251). The reported effect (d = 0.31) is small by conventional benchmarks, but the Discussion recommends “institutions should adopt structured feedback as standard practice” without qualification. I’d ask the authors to either soften this recommendation to match the effect size and the single-cohort nature of the evidence, or add a cost-benefit framing that explains why a small effect still justifies the practical burden of institutional adoption.
Blinding of outcome raters is not described. Proposal quality was rated by two independent reviewers per the Methods (p. 7), but it isn’t stated whether those raters were blind to which arm a proposal’s author was assigned to. If raters were aware of arm assignment, this is a significant source of possible bias in the primary outcome and should be reported explicitly either way.

Minor comments

Table 2: the column header “SD” is not defined in the table note; please confirm this is standard deviation and add a note.
p. 4, line 88: “data was collected” should be “data were collected” (data is conventionally treated as plural in this style).
The pre-registration link in the Methods (p. 5) returns a page-not-found error as of this review; please confirm the registry link is correct and publicly accessible before resubmission.
Figure 1’s y-axis is unlabeled; please add units.
Several citations in the Introduction (e.g., refs 4, 7, 12) are more than 15 years old for claims about current institutional practice; consider whether more recent sources are available.

Confidential comments to the editor

I want to flag for your attention that my major comment #1 (attrition) is, in my view, the comment most likely to change the paper’s overall conclusion if addressed unfavorably — I’d weight it more heavily than the other two major points when considering the recommendation below. I have no conflicts of interest to disclose regarding this manuscript or its authors.

Recommendation

Major revision. The research question, design, and pre-registration are sound, and I think this is a publishable study, but the attrition issue (major comment 1) needs to be resolved with additional analysis before the paper’s central claim can be fully evaluated, and the adoption recommendation in the Discussion should be brought in line with the effect size reported.

Why this structure works

A few things about the worked example above are doing deliberate work, consistent with the practices Reviewer Guidelines describes:

Every comment has a location. Each major and minor comment cites a page, line, table, or figure — not a vague reference to “the statistics” or “the introduction.”
Major and minor comments are kept strictly separate, so an editor and the authors can immediately see which issues gate the decision and which don’t.
The summary is genuinely descriptive, not evaluative. It restates what the paper claims to do, in the reviewer’s own words, before any critique appears — this is also useful signal to the authors about whether their framing landed as intended.
The confidential comments to the editor are consistent with, not contradictory to, the comments the authors see. The reviewer isn’t raising a harsher, separate objection privately; they’re telling the editor which of the public comments matters most.
The recommendation is justified by the comments above it, not asserted on its own. An editor reading only the recommendation line can trace exactly why it was made.

Frequently asked questions

Does every journal use this exact four-part structure?

No — the underlying shape (summary, substantive comments, minor comments, a recommendation) is close to universal, but the exact labels and submission-form fields vary by journal and by editorial system. Some systems separate “comments to author” from “comments to editor” as two distinct text boxes; others use a single free-text field and expect the reviewer to organize it themselves. Always follow the specific journal’s own reviewer instructions over any general template, including this one.

How long should each section be?

Long enough to justify the recommendation with specific, referenced evidence, and no longer. The worked example above is intentionally compact for readability on this page; a real review of a full-length research article commonly runs longer, particularly the major comments section for a manuscript with substantive methodological issues.

Is a review this detailed always necessary for a “minor revision” or “accept” recommendation?

No. A manuscript with no substantive issues may reasonably receive a short summary, a handful of minor comments, and an accept or minor-revision recommendation with no major comments section at all. The structure above scales down naturally — it isn’t a fixed word count to hit, it’s a shape to follow when there’s substantive feedback to organize.

Should I write the recommendation before or after drafting my comments?

Draft the comments first. Writing the summary and comments before committing to a recommendation helps ensure the recommendation follows from specific, evidenced points rather than an initial gut reaction the comments are then written to justify.

Related CASRAI resources

Reviewer Guidelines: What to Look For, How to Structure Comments, and Common Mistakes — the practical craft this worked example puts into a complete document.
Reviewer Comments to Author: Worked Examples and How to Respond — the author’s side of responding to comments like these at the revision stage.
Reviewer Comments on a Rejected Manuscript: A Worked Example — what a decision letter and reviewer comments look like when the outcome is reject rather than revise.
Peer Reviewer: Role, Responsibilities, and How to Become One — becoming a reviewer and the ethical obligations that apply.
Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters — the process overview this report sits within.
ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 (Peer Review Terminology Standard) — the standard behind the recommendation categories used above.
Peer reviewer contribution — how a completed review can be formally recognized.