I recently ran a preprint journal club with other members of the research team at the Bennett Institute. Below are some of the resources we used and the final review that we generated.
“The rise in preprinting provides a fantastic opportunity for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to engage in peer review, make the reviews public and use them as career currency”
Most journals provide some form of guidelines for reviewers. Some examples are:
Reporting guidelines provide a structured framework of minimum requirements for reporting research, ensuring that studies are described thoroughly enough to be understood, evaluated, and replicated by other researchers. The EQUATOR Network has a list of reporting guidelines for different types of research and study designs (e.g. STROBE for observational studies).
Reporting guidelines are useful when reporting your own research, but also provide a clear rubric for critically assessing other research.
There are other sources of guidance for reviewers including guidelines from individual labs or organisations promoting preprint review. Examples include:
There are many preprint servers on which to find preprints to review. Below are some examples covering health data research:
PREreview provides an easy way to post preprint reviews that get given a DOI and, for some preprint servers, are surfaced directly alongside the original preprint.
For example, the review we completed was submitted on PREreview here and shortly after was posted to Zenodo and given a DOI. Following this, the review was also posted as a review on medRxiv via TRiP community reviews.