“The wording is on occasion somewhat emotional”: a qualitative study of English and German peer reviews for a chemical journal

Abstract

Peer reviews are an essential text type in academia. Due to their internal character, however, few empirical studies of the text type exist. This paper reports on a study of a large corpus of peer reviews of manuscripts submitted for publication as communication/Zuschrift in the high impact chemical journal Angewandte Chemie. There are both German and English peer reviews, although the language of the review is not always identical with the language of the reviewed manuscript. Apart from the language choice of reviews, meta-linguistic comments in them are analysed as well as the vocabulary and style of evaluation and reference to the members of the communicative triad of reviewer, journal editor and manuscript author(s) in the reviews.