The following are some questions you may want to address in your critique no matter what type of article you are critiquing.
1. Is the title of the article appropriate and clear?
2. Is the abstract specific, representative of the article, and in the correct form?
3. Is the purpose of the article made clear in the introduction?
4. Do you find errors of fact and interpretation?
5. Is all of the discussion relevant?
6. Has the author cited the pertinent, and only the pertinent, literature? If the author has included inconsequential references, or references that are not pertinent, suggest deleting them.
7. Have any ideas been overemphasized or under-emphasized?
8. Should some sections of the manuscript be expanded, condensed or omitted?
9. Are the author’s statements clear? Challenge ambiguous statements. Suggest by examples how clarity can be achieved, but do not merely substitute your style for the author’s.
10. What underlying assumptions does the author have?
11. Has the author been objective in his or her discussion of the topic?
1. Is the objective of the experiment or of the observations important for the field?
2. Are the experimental methods described adequately?
3. Are the study design and methods appropriate for the purposes of the study?
4. Have the procedures been presented in enough detail to enable a reader to duplicate them?
5. Scan and spot-check calculations. Are the statistical methods appropriate?
6. Do you find any content repeated or duplicated? A common fault is repetition in the text of data in tables or figures. Suggest that tabular data be interpreted of summarized, nor merely repeated, in the text.
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