one sentence review

Via Harriet — apparently the poets D.A. Powell and Randall Mann were sick of reading long-winded book reviews and they put together the One Sentence Review. The project was short-lived but now the one sentence reviews are all captured at Michigan Quarterly Review.

The one sentence review might be something to extend into the domain of double-blind peer review as well.  OK, that’s not reasonable, though I have heard that the length of peer reviews has been an issue in the past — I have anecdotally heard of mega-20+ page reviews.  Overall, review length is probably highly variable, contingent on various factors: the paper itself, reviewer, editor, journal, discipline, etc.  I don’t know if length-related peer review norms have changed over time (anyone know?), but my sense (for the journals I deal with) is that two-three pages is the norm these days.

Here are some other, more serious orgtheory ideas and posts related to peer review:

• Triple blind peer review.
• Universal peer review.
• The illusion of blind peer review.
• Many other peer review-related posts here.