Trail Stop 14: Not Every Reviewer Has to Review Everything

Becoming an Excellent Peer Reviewer: A Writer’s Camp Learning Trail

Leslie H. Nicoll, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN

Writer’s Camp Director

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Know what you know, and know what you don’t know.

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For decades, peer review has rested on a quiet assumption: an excellent reviewer should be able to evaluate most, if not all, aspects of a manuscript, including the literature review, theoretical framework, study design, analysis, interpretation, even the writing itself. An excellent reviewer reads the whole paper and comments knowledgeably on all of it.

Increasingly, that expectation is unrealistic. Manuscripts have become more specialized, methods more varied, and nursing science more sophisticated. A single manuscript might include implementation science, qualitative interviews, patient-reported outcomes, psychometric testing, and complex statistical modeling. Another might address nursing education, workforce issues, clinical practice, or health policy, each requiring different forms of knowledge and experience.

You may be deeply qualified to evaluate one or two dimensions of a manuscript and much less qualified to evaluate others. That does not make you an inadequate reviewer. It makes you a reviewer who understands the boundaries of your expertise.

As we arrive at the final Trail Stop in our Summer of Peer Review, I want to challenge one last assumption about what it means to become an excellent peer reviewer: You do not have to review everything.

The Myth of the All-Purpose Reviewer

Historically, the idea of the all-purpose reviewer was not unreasonable. In many fields, including nursing, a knowledgeable scholar could be expected to assess the literature, study design, analysis, interpretation, and writing. The reviewer might not be equally strong in every area, but the distance among those areas was often manageable. A careful scholar could read the manuscript as a whole and offer a reasonably integrated judgment. However, that expectation has become harder to sustain.

Early in my nursing career, one of the profession’s goals was to strengthen the quality and rigor of nursing research. Over time, the profession has answered that call. Nursing science has become increasingly sophisticated, with advances in methodology, measurement, statistics, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Every advance, however, brings new challenges. The same specialization that has strengthened nursing scholarship has made comprehensive evaluation by a single reviewer increasingly difficult.

The problem comes when reviewers interpret partial expertise as inadequate expertise.

You may immediately recognize that the theoretical framework is weak but feel much less comfortable evaluating a complex statistical model. Perhaps you have extensive clinical experience and recognize that a proposed intervention would be nearly impossible to implement in practice, even though you are not the person to critique the methods used for data collection. You may be an expert in qualitative methods but have little experience with psychometrics. Or perhaps years of teaching, research, or writing have given you an excellent eye for an argument that simply does not hold together but you don’t feel like a clinical expert anymore. Those are not deficiencies in your review. The editor may have invited you, knowing what your particular expertise is—or maybe made an educated guess. It is up to you to review the manuscript fairly and honestly, within the limits of what you know.

An editor may be receiving input about the manuscript from several sources: other peer reviewers, methodological or statistical consultants, members of the editorial team, and, where journal policy and confidentiality requirements permit, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools. As a reviewer, coordinating those inputs is not your responsibility, and, in fact, you probably won’t even know about them. Your responsibility is to contribute something no other reviewer—and no machine—can duplicate: your particular combination of knowledge, experience, and perspective.

Let that be the guidepost for your review.

Ask yourself: What do I see in this manuscript because of what I know and what I have experienced? That is where your review can add the greatest value.

Choose Where You Review

Knowing what you bring to a review also means being thoughtful about where you offer that expertise. One of the best places to begin is with journals you already know, read, and choose as places to publish your work.

Familiarity with a journal itself is a form of reviewer knowledge. You know the audience because you are part of it. You have a sense of the topics published and the conversations taking place among readers, authors, and the editor. You may recognize the literature its readers are likely to know and understand how a particular manuscript might contribute to that literature. You do not need to agree with everything a journal publishes, but “knowing” the journal gives you useful context for evaluating work submitted to it.

If you are a new reviewer, I would go even further: review only for journals you know. You are already learning a new skill. Familiarity with the journal gives you one less unknown to manage while you learn the peer review process. You understand where the manuscript is trying to fit, who its readers will be, and what kinds of contributions are appropriate for the journal.

Once you become comfortable with peer review, you can branch out. An invitation from an unfamiliar journal may introduce you to a publication that becomes important to you. But even then, be selective. I think reviewing primarily for journals you know is a good personal rule throughout your career.

Editors are constantly searching for reviewers, so invitations from unfamiliar journals will arrive. They may find your name in a database, see that you have published on a particular topic, find you in a manuscript’s reference list, or receive your name as a recommendation from another reviewer.

But an invitation does not necessarily mean you are the right reviewer. A cold call from an editor should not turn you into a warm body in their reviewer pool.

When an invitation arrives, ask yourself two questions. Do I know this journal well enough to understand its audience and purpose? What can I contribute to the evaluation of this manuscript?

If you are a new reviewer and the answer to the first question is no, decline. There will be other opportunities. If you are an experienced reviewer considering an unfamiliar journal, take the time to investigate it before accepting. Is it reputable? Is its scope relevant to your work? Read some recent articles. Look at the editorial board and peer review information. Then read the title and abstract of the manuscript and consider why you may have been invited. And, always remember: you do not want to review for a predatory journal.

When in doubt, decline. A good review invitation is not simply one you can accept. It is one for which you have a reason to say yes.

Stay in Your Lane—and Tell the Editor Where the Lane Ends

Once you accept a review, resist the urge to demonstrate expertise you do not have. You are not expected to become a statistician, qualitative researcher, clinician, educator, policy expert, and grammarian simply because all of those elements appear in the manuscript in front of you.

Review what you know and review it well.

If you are a clinician, your practice knowledge may allow you to see problems that are invisible to someone who has spent a career in research. Is the intervention feasible? Does the description of clinical practice ring true? Are important patient or family concerns missing? Could the recommendations actually be implemented in the setting the authors describe?

If methodology is your strength, concentrate there. If you have particular expertise in measurement, theory, education, policy, or qualitative research, use it. And if something falls outside your expertise, do not bluff. You can certainly identify a concern or ask a question, but you do not need to manufacture an authoritative critique of something you are not qualified to evaluate.

Most importantly, tell the editor where you focused.

A sentence at the beginning or end of your review can be enormously helpful:

“My review focused primarily on the clinical content and implications for practice. I did not evaluate the statistical analysis in depth.”

Or:

“I focused on the qualitative methodology and interpretation of the findings. The psychometric analysis falls outside of my area of expertise.”

Statements like these do not weaken your review. They make it more useful. You are giving the editor information not only about the manuscript but also about how to interpret your review.

This is also why you do not need to comment on everything simply to make your review look substantial. Length is not a measure of quality. A focused review that identifies three important issues within your expertise may contribute far more than pages of comments on every section of the manuscript.

Think of your review as one piece of a larger evaluation. You may not know what other reviewers have been asked to assess, what expertise they bring, or what additional input the editor has available. That is okay. Your job is not to fill every gap. Your job is to make your contribution count.

Your Review Is Not the Decision

Many journals ask reviewers to make a recommendation: accept, revise, reject, or some variation of those choices. Make the recommendation you believe is warranted and explain the reasoning that supports it.

Then let it go.

Your recommendation is one piece of information provided to the editor. You do not know what the other reviewers have said. You may not know that the editor sought additional methodological or statistical consultation. You do not know what concerns the editor identified during an initial reading or what additional information emerged during the review process.

This is why two excellent reviewers can read the same manuscript and reach different conclusions. They bring different knowledge, experiences, perspectives, and priorities to the task. One may see a serious methodological problem while another recognizes an important clinical contribution. One may be troubled by the conceptual framework while another focuses on whether the findings are adequately supported by the data.

Neither review is necessarily wrong. Peer review is valuable precisely because different reviewers see different things.

Your responsibility is to give the editor your best assessment, supported by clear reasoning. It is not to persuade the editor to follow your recommendation, nor is it to anticipate and reconcile every other perspective that may be brought to the manuscript.

This can be especially important when you later discover that an article you recommended rejecting was published, or that a manuscript you strongly supported was not. The editor did not necessarily ignore your review. Your review became part of a larger body of information used to make the decision. Trust the editor to integrate and weigh the full set of inputs.

An excellent reviewer brings expertise to the process without needing to control the outcome. You have done your job when you have read carefully, evaluated thoughtfully, communicated clearly, and contributed what you know.

The decision belongs to the editor. Remember the adage: reviewers advise, editors decide.

Conclusion: The End of the Trail

Throughout this Summer of Peer Review, we have explored what it means to become an excellent peer reviewer. The 16 authors in this series have written about accepting invitations, reading manuscripts critically, evaluating different types of papers, writing constructive feedback, making recommendations, and developing peer review as a professional habit.

Excellence in peer review begins with knowing what you know—and recognizing what you do not know. It means bringing your particular expertise to a manuscript with care and precision, without feeling responsible for finding every weakness or commenting on every aspect of the work.

Bring your knowledge, experience, curiosity, and perspective to every review you accept. Pay attention to what you see because of the particular path you have traveled as a clinician, educator, researcher, scholar, student, or reader. Be rigorous in the areas where you have expertise and candid about the areas where you do not. Give authors feedback that is thoughtful and useful. Give editors information they can trust.

Your review is one contribution to a larger process. Other reviewers may see things you missed. An editor may seek additional expertise. New tools, including AI, may contribute other forms of analysis. None of that diminishes what you bring to the process. In fact, it makes your contribution more important.

What no other reviewer—and no machine—can bring is your particular combination of knowledge and experience, applied thoughtfully to the manuscript in front of you.

That is your guidepost.

Fourteen Trail Stops ago, we began with a question: What does it take to become an excellent peer reviewer? Perhaps the answer is simpler than it seemed at the beginning.

Know what you know. Know what you don’t. And make your contribution count.

Our Summer of Peer Review trail ends here. Thanks for joining us on the hike.

Author: Leslie H. Nicoll

Reviewed and Edited by: Marilyn Oermann

Copyright © 2026: Writer’s Camp and Leslie H. Nicoll

Citation: Nicoll LH. Trail Stop 14: Not every reviewer has to know everything. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 2026; 2(3):14. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22004829