To my reviewers, with respect and gratitude: Guidelines from an author

Reviewing a scientific article requires knowledge, mental energy, and patience. Afterwards, writing the review report requires additional energy and time (a few hours up to a whole day; Ware & Mabe, 2015; Huisman & Smits, 2017, Publons, 2018). Thus, it would be regrettable if so much effort and time could not translate into clear comments and/or questions and if reviewers' remarks could not elicit sharp authors' answers. It was and is still universally recognized that the primary aim of a review is improving an article (Johnson et al., 2018); hence, the effectiveness of science communication and the extent of reliable scientific knowledge. Reviewers might provide authors more help by avoiding imperfections often seen in articles' review reports. To achieve this, journals or publishers often provide guidelines for peer review (Allen et al., 2019), but the latter are sometimes disregarded or soon forgotten. The authors are then left with a bitter feeling that the review has been a chore that ended in difficult-to-decipher comments and hard-to-implement recommendations. Upon receiving a review report, authors are often disappointed (Huisman & Smits, 2017) because their work has been criticized by invisible reviewers (in the case of blind review) if not by opponents, and because the questions may force them to retrieve months-old files, scrutinize anew intricate data, carry out complementary analyses, design new graphs, amend the text, and write down answers to all the questions and comments, which is the last but not easiest task. Reviewers may, should, and do really help. In previous surveys, authors agreed peer review is necessary (93%), improves the quality of papers (90%), helps scientific communication (85%), and ensures a kind of control (83%; Ware, 2008) or improve the general quality and integrity of scholarly communication (Publons, 2018). After all, 88% are satisfied with the process (Ware, 2008), up to 43% with the delays, 56.5% with the objectivity, and 55.4 with the quality (Publons, 2018). Therefore, if the authors had to review the comments they receive, I suggest they would respectfully write the following report. As most reviewers (possibly 90%) are authors too (Ware, 2008) they should find it easy to put themselves in the authors' shoes and ‘treat all papers (…) as they would wish their own papers to be treated’ (Bienz & Weston, 2012). Practically, a reviewer might ask themself three questions: (1) Is everything in my report easy to understand? (2) Would I accept, as author, each request I made? (3) Are the desirable amendments achievable within a few weeks? A single ‘No’ should tell the reviewer to revise the report from an author's viewpoint. This will help the authors to make the required amendments, improve the manuscript, and ensure the greater good of the whole scientific community. JI conceived the paper, investigated its references, wrote its original draft, and edited its final version. None. The author declares no conflict of interest.