The referee report according to publication recommendation and reviewers’ academic productivity

Abstract

The referee report of research articles is a discursive genre in which a part of the collective process of building knowledge is crystalized. Given its confidentiality, there is little empirical work on this genre. Among these few contributions, a series of limitations can be identified, such as the lack of definition of the unit of analysis or the lack of integration between discursive and sociometric data. In this article, we present a model that contributes to overcoming these limitations. The model was applied with the purpose of analyzing the variation of referee reports according to two extralinguistic variables, i.e., publication recommendation (accepted, conditioned, rejected) and referee’s number of published articles. The results showed that both extralinguistic attributes were associated with specific discourse variations, of which publication recommendation was more decisive than referee’s academic productivity.