Such recognition is critical for junior authors, but even senior authors value it. And our disciplines can only benefit from an atmosphere of mutual appreciation of one another's efforts. Yet despite its importance, peer review tends to be uneven in quality. Probably most authors have had the frustration of getting mere summary comments from a reviewer who did not seriously address a manuscript's argument-or even understand it. These problems arise because peer review is hard to do well.
Most peer review is done by people with some stake in the outcome.
Keeping the author's identity from a reviewer cannot disguise the intellectual impact a work will have on an academic field. The reviewer may recommend against publication of a manuscript that he or she finds threatening. I received no training to review my peers, and I doubt many people do. Graduate school teaches us to find and criticize logical flaws, but peer review requires far more than that, as the guidelines below should show. Moreover, faculty members receive little professional recognition for peer-reviewing, regardless of how well they do it.