Timothy H Parker , Simon C Griffith, Judith Lee Bronstein, Fiona Fidler, Susan Adlai Foster, Hannah Fraser, Wolfgang Forstmeier, Jessica Gurevitch, Julia Koricheva, Ralf Seppelt

Peer review is widely considered fundamental to maintaining the rigor of science, but it is an imperfect process. In that context, it is noteworthy that formal standards or guidelines for peer reviews themselves are rarely discussed in many disciplines, including ecology and evolutionary biology. Some may argue that a dearth of explicit guidelines is not a problem. After all, a tremendous amount of effective peer reviewing happens every day. However, there are reasons to expect that well-constructed guidelines in the form of checklists could be useful for improving certain aspects of peer review), such as promoting transparency of reviewed manuscripts, and that such checklists might be widely and enthusiastically adopted by many reviewers. Although some journals already provide checklists to reviewers, most of these checklists are quite limited in scope and do not substantially improve the rigor of the review process. There are also guidelines that seek to explain the general process of peer review. Instead we propose a short list of important questions that reviewers can use to help authors produce more transparent and reliable manuscripts. We want to empower excellent peer review because it helps promote the production of high quality scientific publications.