How to Use eLife to Learn Peer Review
(and Outsmart Reviewer #2)
Peer review is broken, but as anyone who has taken even a slightly long look at academia will already know, things being broken almost seems to be an incentive to keep doing them… The good news is that it doesn’t have to break you!
Whether you’re a grad student, postdoc, or early-career researcher, by the end of this article, you’ll have a practical checklist to guide your peer review process and sharpen your critical thinking skills.
You need to read peer reviews to know how they work.
I hadn’t even seen a peer review when I started writing my first paper. Now I’ve seen more than I care to think about, I know the value of understanding the common themes and criticisms that tend to come up. I use these insights when I’m editing my clients’ academic papers to help reduce the likelihood of revision requests. But you’re not an editor (unless you are, in which case you probably don’t need to read this article), so, where you going to find hundreds of peer reviews that you can use to learn about the process and build your critical thinking skills when reading and writing papers?
Enter eLife
eLife is a journal that has adopted an entirely different approach to peer review. Instead of gatekeeping the process, eLife puts it all on display.
Here’s how it works: once a manuscript makes it to the peer review stage, it gets posted on the eLife website, regardless of the review outcome. Each article is tagged as one of the following:
Version of Record – a fully reviewed and revised paper
Revised – authors have revised the paper but it’s not finalized
Not Revised – authors did not revise the paper after peer review
Most importantly, peer reviews and author responses are published alongside every article.
I could write a whole other article on the benefits and downsides of this system (and maybe I will), but this one’s about you and how you can use eLife as a free, practical tool to level up your peer review literacy and sharpen your critical thinking skills.
Step 1: Decode Reviewer Comments
Pick 10 to 20 papers in your field of interest and then… forget about the full article. Just read the reviews. Yes, seriously.
Ignore the main text and head straight to the reviewer comments. What do they focus on? Which issues come up repeatedly? Poor figure clarity? Insufficient detail in the methods? Overstated conclusions?
Start building a bank of recurring comments you see across papers. These are your roadmap to what reviewers care about and what to think about as you’re reading papers relevant to your project. Knowing what reviewers look for will help you better evaluate the studies you’re considering incorporating into your own work.
Step 2: Critique the Critics
Once you’re familiar with the review process, pick some more papers and read them alongside the reviews. Do you agree with the reviewers' feedback? Did they miss something glaring? Were they overly nitpicky?
This exercise builds your ability to evaluate critiques, not just passively accept them. It’s important to understand not only what gets said, but why it gets said.
Ask yourself:
Would I have made that point?
Is this a matter of taste or a real scientific flaw?
If I were the author, how would I respond?
This will help you get in the mindset of an author (which you will be) responding to peer review comments. If you’re already aware of the aspects you tend to agree or disagree with in peer reviews without the personal aspect of the review being about your own paper, you’ll find it easier to objectively evaluate and respond to reviewer comments when they are about your work.
Step 3: Practice Makes Perfect
Pick a new eLife paper in your field. Don’t read the reviews yet. Just the abstract, intro, and figures… like a real reviewer would. Write a mock review: 3–5 bullet points on clarity, novelty, logic, or anything else that stands out. Use the template provided at the end of this article to organize your review or build your own.
Then read the actual reviewer comments.
How well did your feedback align?
What did you miss?
Where did you disagree? Why?
This will help you build your analytical muscle and identify your own blind spots. If you find you’re consistently missing certain things that reviewers are highlighting, it’s likely that those issues will creep into your study design and writing as well. Knowing where you miss issues in other peoples’ work will help you address those gaps in your own before a reviewer has the chance to point them out.
Step 4: Preempt Reviewer #2
As you write your own paper, pause at the end of each section and turn on your inner reviewer.
What would a reviewer question in this paragraph?
Does that figure label make sense?
Would Reviewer #2 accuse this of being speculative?
Use your bank of common review themes to preemptively clean up potential messes before they become delays.
You can’t avoid all critique. That’s impossible. But you can minimize issues by focusing on common reviewer comments and use your knowledge of the review process get your paper through with fewer bumps.
Peer review is a skill. Like any skill, it gets better the more you practice it and reflect on it.
eLife offers something most journals don't: a transparent look into how papers are judged and improved.
Take advantage of this!
Even if you start with just one article a week, you'll get better insights and build better instincts that will help you in your critical evaluation of papers when reading, your study design, and your writing process.
Reviewer #2 will always be out there, but with eLife, you’ve got the tools to get ahead of them. Start with one paper today. Your future self (and your next manuscript) will thank you.
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