Etydhv

I am a mathematician, frequently asked to referee papers. (As my career progresses, I now find myself frequently asked to referee good papers.)

I have found that I've gotten pickier and pickier as a referee. I just now finished a referee report (for an excellent paper, submitted to an excellent journal) with 53 bullet points on it -- mistakes I found, requests for clarification, other suggestions.

On another occasion I believe I submitted six "revise and resubmit" reports for the same paper, before finally recommending acceptance.

In all these cases I am spending a lot of time reading the papers (which is worthwhile; they're interesting papers!), and I'm almost as meticulous as if it were my name on the paper.

How can I tell if I am going overboard with this? I have never heard any negative comments by anyone -- including by journal editors, whom I asked for feedback on this matter after sending my reports. Indeed, editors have acted extremely happy that I've read these papers in such close detail. Nevertheless, I wonder if I am investing too much time in this, and/or annoying the authors.

It sounds like you are doing fine. It is in everyone's best interest to have high quality work and presentation. The authors don't need to take every suggestion you make, but are wise to consider what you say in each case.

But if you are overboard, you will hear from the editor. As long as you keep getting papers to review, don't worry about being too hard. Feedback is good for everyone.

In my humble opinion, it looks like you are the ideal reviewer actually! You give a lot of advice to improve the paper, and this directly benefits the authors and the journal. And apparently you give very precise advice, which is much more useful and actionable than general or vague remarks.

My main concern as a reviewer is to be fair in my final recommendation. As long as your meticulousness doesn't lead you to reject potentially good papers, you are doing a good job as a reviewer. However the question of whether you are spending too much time on it depends on your priorities, it's important to weigh the benefits and costs for yourself before you accept. It's perfectly acceptable to refuse a review from time to time in order to maintain the level of quality for the ones you accept.

If you manage to finish a report within a few months, then a careful detailed report is great (and it will make the author happy to see that at least one person really read the article). Having to choose between a superficial report within a month and an extensive list of all typographic and stylistic issues 2 years after submission, I would still prefer the superficial one.

And: Some things are a matter of personal taste. It would be nice not to request an author to rewrite a paper using different notation or completely change the structure or presentation, just because you (and maybe 60% of the people in the field) would prefer it that way (as long as it is still reasonable and not completely uncommon to do it the author's way).

Virtually every author is happy if others are reading their papers in detail. Neither is the editor going to object - highly detailed reviews are great from their perspective too. So you won't be going overboard on that front.

If anyone is unhappy you are being "too picky", it'll be on your end. Maybe you spend so much time reading papers that your PhD students / your own projects are being neglected, for example. Therefore you'll know the answer to this question better than anyone else. As long as you don't need the time you spend reviewing papers elsewhere, it's all good.