Abstract Peer review is essential for scientific progress. When it works well, it combines expertise, fairness, proportionality, skepticism, generosity, and discretion. When it fails, it becomes a theatre for egotistical display, laziness, coercion, and, lately, reliance on artificial intelligence tools. Editors, reviewers, and authors must join forces to ensure that peer review remains a reliable instrument for judging the quality of scientific publications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the reviewer's mandate: the rigorous and fair assessment of scientific work, done by human experts who understand that it is not their role to redesign the authors' research program, manipulate citations to their own benefit, outsource judgement to large language models, or to violate the trust on which the peer review principles depend.
Soares et al. (Fri,) studied this question.