Dossier Registry · Reviewers
Ninety minutes a quarter, and your name on the record.
A registry open to the world needs more reviewers than two physicians can supply. If you are a medical student, a doctoral student, a clinician or a working scientist, you already have the only skill this requires.
The problem you would be solving
Two physicians cannot review a registry that is open to the world, and a venue whose review queue collapses is worse than no venue. The people who can fix that are medical students, doctoral students, postdocs and working scientists, who are plentiful, early in their careers, and already read papers critically for a living.
The work is narrower than peer review usually is. You are not asked to judge novelty or importance. You are asked to re-run a published query, check that the numbers come back, and read the author’s limitations against the author’s claims. For most dossiers that is ninety minutes.
What we ask
Small, bounded, and genuinely easy to leave.
Per dossier
About 90 minutes, nearly all of it re-running a published query and reading a limitations section against a claim.
How often
One or two dossiers a quarter. You may decline any submission for any reason, including being busy.
Term
No minimum. Reviewers leave whenever they like, and we say so publicly rather than listing lapsed names.
Contact with students
None. Review is written and routed through us, which is deliberate and is why no background check is required.
Who is eligible
- Medical students at any stage, including first year.
- Doctoral students and postdocs in biology, chemistry, bioinformatics, public health or a related field.
- Practising clinicians and working scientists in industry or academia.
- Undergraduates in their final year, paired with a second reviewer for their first three dossiers.
What you get
- Your name published on every dossier you review, permanently, as the named reviewer.
- A citable record of peer-review service, which is a real line on an academic CV and unusually hard to get before your doctorate.
- Documented teaching and mentoring experience, which medical residency and faculty applications both ask about.
- First sight of the work, and a say in what a venue reviewing student science decides to be.
The rules
- Declare any conflict of interest and we will route the submission elsewhere. We ask; we do not investigate.
- Review the work, never the person. Reviews are published, and a review that comments on the author rather than the analysis is not.
- If you cannot reproduce a number from the author's own query, say so plainly. That is the single most valuable thing you can do here.
- If you cannot finish in 30 days, hand it back. A dossier returned unreviewed costs us nothing; one sitting silently in a queue costs us a student.
Offer to review
One dossier. No obligation to take the next one.
If we take you up on it we send a single dossier with a 30-day window. Decline it for any reason, including being busy. Hand it back unfinished rather than let it sit — a returned dossier costs us nothing, a silent queue costs us a student.