“This work is antithetical to the spirit of research”: An anatomy of harsh peer reviews
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Unprofessional reviews can impact productivity and cause emotional distress, particularly for early-career researchers and those from underrepresented groups.
“Furthermore, unprofessional reviews can impact productivity and cause emotional distress, particularly for early-career researchers and those from underrepresented groups (Silbiger and Stubler, 2019; Hyland and Jiang, 2020).”
From The Good, the Bad and the Constructive: Automatically Measuring Peer Review's Utility for Authors (2025) · cites this paper as Hyland and Jiang, 2020
In “Comment and criticism in peer reviews” (pp. 4–5), the paper says harsh reviews can be demoralizing, exacerbate negative feelings, and discourage first-time writers from revising and resubmitting. This supports emotional distress and a possible effect on publication activity, especially for novices. It does not establish an effect on productivity more broadly or identify researchers from underrepresented groups as particularly affected. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Cites
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Carless, D., Jung, J., & Li, Y. (2024) · Studies in Higher Education · doi:10.1080/03075079.2023.2242888 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
The Good, the Bad and the Constructive: Automatically Measuring Peer Review’s Utility for Authors
Sadallah, A., Baumgärtner, T., Gurevych, I., & Briscoe, T. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1476 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
PRISM: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Peer Reviewers
Loc, N. P. P., La Viet, T. H., Khanh, T. T., Nguyen, D. A., Pham, T. A. N., Nguyen, T., Chawla, N. V., Buntine, W., Wong, K.-S., Doan, K. D., et al. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.26730
The Good, the Bad and the Constructive: Automatically Measuring Peer Review's Utility for Authors
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“Furthermore, unprofessional reviews can impact productivity and cause emotional distress, particularly for early-career researchers and those from underrepresented groups (Silbiger and Stubler, 2019; Hyland and Jiang, 2020).”
- Authors
- Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. (.
- Affiliations
- University of East Anglia (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Jiang, Feng (Kevin)
- Venue
- Journal of English for Academic Purposes
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-07
- Volume
- 46
- Pages
- 100867
- ISSN
- 1475-1585 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3012487136
- Cited by
- 66
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 86.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of English for Academic Purposes (publishedVersion)
- UEA Digital Repository (University of East Anglia) (acceptedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Keywords
- peer review, scholarly publishing, author experience, stance markers, formative feedback, high-impact journals
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