Dealing with rejection anxiety as a reviewer I am not very experienced as a reviewer, and I often find myself stressing over recommending rejection, even for the articles which I think are clearly low-quality and unsuitable for publication in a strong journal. I imagine how the authors might feel (especially if I suspect they are PhD students/postdocs/early career researchers who have a lot at stake in the publication), and I second-guess my judgement and wonder if it would align with others’ opinions. I also always worry that I might come across as unnecessarily harsh and critical in my reviewer report, especially as English is not my native language, so I have limited ability to express myself clearly and succinctly.
This usually leads to me writing too verbose and too detailed review reports (I think). More critically, it caused me a few times to recommend major revisions in the first review round when I thought that the manuscript should really be rejected but didn’t have the guts to suggest it. So inevitably, there comes the second round, the manuscript is not much improved, and I am left stressing again over recommending rejection. I think in such instances it would have been better to just suggest rejection initially, and more importantly it would probably have been fairer to the authors and would not waste their, my or the editor’s time.
Basically, I am asking how to overcome this anxiety about suggesting rejection and the fear of coming across as the “bad reviewer.” Are my concerns valid?
The role of the reviewer is not so much gate-keeper, but rather your role is to help the authors get the paper to a position where it is publishable. So I very rarely recommend outright rejection at the first round.
Once you have written things down what it would take for the paper to be publishable, it maybe the case that this is clearly unachievable and that this author will never get this paper to that level – but that is for the editor and authors to decide.
Reviewers are normally asked to judge two things:

Is the paper sufficiently novel and exciting to be interesting to a large enough fraction of the readership of the journal.

Is the paper sufficiently rigorous to demonstrate the claims it makes.


If the paper is not sufficiently novel or exciting I say:

To make this paper publishable, the authors must explain the additional advances made compared to Smith et al. and Jones et al. and why their work would be of interest to a reader of the Journal of Things, beyond those connected with the sub field of very small things.

Methodological or interpretive flaws I will simply point out and say they must be fixed.
So for example, I recently had to review a paper for a software tool. It unlikely to get published, but instead of saying “reject” I said:


The tool does not appear to implement any new functionality compared to  Jones et al and indeed is missing several of the functions in that tool. The authors should explain why their tool is an advance in comparison, and provide benchmarking data comparing the performance.

The tool was not installable on my system, the authors should ensure that there is a robust installation routine and that it functions on representative range of systems. {goes on to list the problems with the installation}

The tool has several bugs and conceptual errors in it that must be fixed before it was published. {goes on to list them}


In conclusion, the tool has several usability and functional shortcomings that must be fixed. Even if these were fixed, the authors must explain why their tool is superior, or even equal in performance or features to Jones et al.

Now I was 80% sure that this wasn’t going to happen – the amount of work required to bring the paper up to a publishable standard was probably more than had been put into the project up until that point – but if they wanted to do it, I’d be happy to recommend publication. I never saw another revision of the paper – I don’t know if the editor decided to reject it, or the authors decided it wasn’t worth it –, but I fulfilled my role: to say what it was that was necessary to bring it up to standard.
If the authors do decide to try for a resubmission, without fixing the problems I identified, I will just say that:

The authors have not addressed points A, B and C, and I cannot recommend publication until they have done so.


There are several &quot;Peer Reviewer's Oaths&quot; out there. The one I like is from here:
http://www.opiniomics.org/the-reviewers-oath/

I, the reviewer, promise:

to not hide behind a screen of anonymity
to be open and honest with you (the authors) at all times
to be constructive in my criticism
within the rules given to me by the journal, to assist you in every way
I ethically can to get your manuscript published, by providing
criticism and praise that is valid and relevant