Help:Reviewers

You are reading this page probably because you received a special URL from a top expert in your field asking you to review and accept his or her Scholarpedia article.

Peer-review process in Scholarpedia is not anonymous if you accept the article, as your name will be acknowledged at the bottom of the article with a link to the version of the article that you accepted, so that your reputation validates the content of the article at the time when you accepted it. Thus, accept only those articles that are encyclopedic and of the highest scholarly quality.

However, rejection is anonymous. You can either reject the article yourself, or provide the special URL to your trusted colleague for review. Any user, even an unregistered one, can reject articles in Scholarpedia if the user has access to the special URL.

Each article has a strict deadline by which it must be finished and accepted by all reviewers. Thus, your timely review and acceptance will be highly appreciated by the authors.

At the top of each article you will see a link name "Discussion" -- use this link to add your comments. You are also free to edit the article directly, but please be sure to do judiciously, as there are differences among authors regarding how receptive they are to direct modifications.

To accept or reject the article, click on the reviewer URL that was emailed to you by the authors and press either the button labeled ‘accept’ or ‘reject’. By accepting the article, you are vouching that you are qualified to review the article, that the article is encyclopedic, and that the article is accurate.

If you reject the article, it is immediately moved away from the main namespace in which you found it.

If you neither accept nor reject the article, and only one or none of the other reviewers accepted or rejected it, then the article will be “implicitly rejected” after the deadline.