Referee Checklist

Referee Checklist

Review substance before style and report blockers first.

Checklist

1. Confirm the material is author-owned, public, or approved for AI review.
2. Summarize the paper or section in 5-7 sentences using only the provided text.
3. Check whether research question, contribution, data, sample, and estimand are explicit.
4. Check identification: treatment, comparison group, timing, identifying assumption, threats, pre-trends, spillovers, and external validity.
5. Check econometrics: clustering, functional form, weighting, multiple testing, missing data, and robustness logic.
6. Check tables and figures against text claims.
7. Flag citations or literature claims that need human verification.
8. Separate major issues, minor issues, and optional polish.

Output

# Referee-Style Review

## Major Issues

## Minor Issues

## Robustness Or Clarification Requests

## Citation Or Evidence Checks

## Optional Prose Edits

Constraints

• Do not invent missing results or citations.
• Do not upgrade descriptive or correlational text to causal language.
• Do not edit confidential material without explicit permission.