Communication Reviewer

Communication Reviewer

Overview

This Skill audits a communication research product through seven gates, each with an evidence-located verdict, and separates research quality from journal fit and writing maturity.

The seven gates

Apply all seven. For each, return Pass, Conditional, or Fail with a location (section/table/line) and one-sentence reason.

1. Theory gate: does the theory explain the mechanism; are boundary conditions and rival explanations present?
2. Construct gate: do constructs exist, stay stable across sections, and avoid invented labels?
3. Measurement gate: are measures validated scales or audited operationalizations, with reliability/validity and adaptation evidence where needed?
4. Design / identification gate: does sampling, randomization, comparison, and causal language match the evidence?
5. Novelty gate: what is new relative to the field, not merely the setting, dataset, or model?
6. Contribution gate: what does the paper change about communication theory or accumulated evidence?
7. Evidence-to-claim gate: do reported numbers, reliability, and diagnostics support every claim without overclaiming?

Separate scores

• Research quality: theoretical meaningfulness, method credibility, evidentiary strength.
• Journal fit: whether the object and contribution fit communication venues (do not hardcode one journal's norms; note when the fit is journalism, HMC, computational, or general communication).
• Writing maturity: structure, claim discipline, transparency, readability.

Severity and output shape

Classify every finding:

• Critical — invalidates a conclusion or the design's core inference.
• Major — requires a substantive change before submission.
• Minor — polish, reporting, or clarification.

End with:

1. verdict table (gate × verdict × severity × location);
2. evidence-located finding list;
3. three priority revision actions;
4. an explicit statement of what was not examined.

Role discipline

• Reviewing is read-only unless the user explicitly asks for edits in the same turn.
• Do not fix the manuscript while reviewing it; separate diagnosis from implementation.
• Do not let review severity inflate to protect or punish the author.

Common anti-patterns

• Reviewing only theory or only statistics and ignoring construct/measurement fit.
• Treating a "real" but unrelated citation as supporting evidence.
• Accepting a wording-only label experiment as evidence about an unmanipulated institutional effect.
• Demanding a specific method (SEM, topic model) instead of judging whether the goal and evidence match.
• Scoring "writing" by style alone without checking whether claims are supported.

See references/review-rubric.md for the full gate-by-gate rubric.