Article reviews: Focus on content or form?

Surprisingly little is known about reviewer comments on journal articles, since article reviews are an occluded genre. Recently, open review journals have made it possible to examine the nature of reviews. In this paper, 12 articles concerning applied linguistics were chosen from Qeios and 284 reviews of these articles collected as data. The reviews were analysed in three main ways: a keyword analysis highlighting words with a proportionately greater frequency in reviews than in articles; a quantitative analysis of reviews in terms of quality ratings, length and the h-index of the reviewer; and a categorisation of reviews into those focusing on the content of the article and those focusing on the form of the article. The findings show that a noticeable proportion of reviewers emphasise following a standard model of the research article over providing feedback on the content raising potential concerns about the quality of some published research.