The review your journal will send you, four months early. You send the manuscript and name the journal you intend to submit to. Five working days later you receive the report a hostile methods and statistics referee would write about it: every objection they will raise, ranked by how likely it is to block, each paired with the specific fix or with the reasoned defence of the paper as it stands.
One manuscript, one named journal, one signed report
Every report carries all five parts, whatever the manuscript.
- A desk-reject screen against your named journal. Scope fit, length and abstract limits counted the way that journal counts them, required sections and declarations, blinding, reporting standards. Everything that can stop a manuscript before a reviewer ever sees it. This part alone can be worth the fee, because a desk rejection costs weeks and explains almost nothing.
- Every objection a referee will raise, ranked by severity. Each objection carries the section and the sentence it attaches to, the wording a referee will actually use, and a verdict: real defect, defensible, or reviewer-noise. Then either the specific fix or the reasoned defence, and a line on what happens if you do nothing.
- A statistics and reporting check. Whether the numbers support the claims made from them. Estimator fit to the design, assumptions stated and checked, effect sizes and intervals, reliability evidence wherever a score is interpreted, and measurement-comparability evidence wherever a claim compares groups, languages, time points or countries.
- A drafted response to reviewers. For the objections that are defensible, one response block each: the point as a referee will put it, the line of defence, and the space for your own wording.
- A readiness statement. What state the manuscript is in, what the largest remaining risk is, and what to do first. It is explicitly not a prediction of acceptance, and it says so in those words.
Sometimes the readiness statement finds that the problem is not the manuscript but the instrument behind it. That is a different question, and it has its own product: the Measurement Quality Audit.
The pre-screen reads a draft before the pilot. The audit diagnoses an instrument you already run. The development builds the one you do not have. Start wherever you are.
The report, or the report and a re-read of your revision
Fixed price, fixed scope, nothing to negotiate before the work starts.
Tier 1. The report
The full five-part referee report on one manuscript, at one named venue.
You receive
- The desk-reject screen against the journal you name
- Every objection, severity-ranked, with the fix or the defence
- The statistics and reporting check
- The response-to-reviewers skeleton
- The readiness statement, signed
550 EUR (385 EUR for doctoral candidates). Five working days from a complete intake.
Tier 2. The report and one re-read
Tier 1, plus a check of your revised manuscript against the first report.
You receive
- Everything in Tier 1
- One re-read of the revised manuscript, once, within 90 days
- Whether each must-fix objection has actually been closed
- What the revision has broken or newly exposed
- A revised readiness statement
850 EUR (595 EUR for doctoral candidates). Five working days for the report, three for the re-read.
Invoiced once the scope check has accepted the manuscript, payable before the five working days start. Prices exclude VAT. The doctoral rate is 30 percent off either tier, on your own statement that you are currently enrolled; no document is asked for. If the report is more than two working days late for any reason on our side, the engagement is refunded in full and you still get the report.
A complete report, on a paper the reviewer wrote himself
Nobody should buy this without seeing what arrives, and no client manuscript will ever be used to show it. So the sample is a full report on the reviewer’s own unpublished working paper, screened against a real journal’s published requirements. It is genuinely adversarial, it is not an excerpt, and nothing in it was softened.
- Read the sample report (PDF, 17 pages): a methods review of a psychometric working paper on ESG rating reliability, screened against the Journal of Business Ethics.
Four fields, and a refusal outside them
What is being sold is one reviewer’s competence, so the scope is the scope of that competence and not a wider claim. A manuscript outside these fields is declined and the fee is not taken, however interesting the paper. Manuscripts are reviewed in English here; manuscripts in Montenegrin, Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian are reviewed through the Montenegrin edition of this page.
Covered
- Quantitative social science
- Measurement and psychometrics
- Psychology
- Education and educational assessment
Declined, with the reason given
- Anything outside those four fields, including clinical trials, econometric identification papers and bench science
- Wholly qualitative manuscripts. In a mixed-methods paper the quantitative component is reviewed and the report names what it did not read
- Studies whose data are not yet collected. That is a design question, not a manuscript
- Manuscripts already rejected with reviews, which need a response-to-reviewers engagement rather than this
Published, because in this market that is the difference
Paid pre-submission review sits next to a part of the academic services market that sells authorship, ghost-writes manuscripts and promises acceptance. Nothing separates an honest version of it from that one except what it commits to in public and what it refuses to do when asked. So the commitments are here, before you pay, rather than in terms afterwards.
1. This is advice to you. It is never co-authorship and never ghost-writing.
The report is written about your manuscript and not into it. No sentence in it is meant to be pasted into your paper: a suggested fix describes the change that is needed and does not supply the text that makes it. The reviewer does not appear as an author, is not acknowledged unless you choose to, and acquires no interest in the work. If you ask for the discussion to be rewritten or the analysis to be run, the answer is no.
2. No outcome is promised and no acceptance is implied.
The report says what a referee will probably object to. It does not say what an editor will decide, because that depends on the editor, on which reviewers are drawn and on what else is in that issue. No report, page or message from this service carries an acceptance probability, a readiness score or a grade. A manuscript reviewed here can still be rejected.
3. Having been paid by you, the reviewer will never afterwards review your manuscript for anybody else.
Dr Milos Kankaras referees for academic journals and is registered with grant-evaluator pools, so this is a real conflict rather than a theoretical one, and an intention is not a control. Every engagement is entered in the firm’s conflict register at intake, before the report is written, with the manuscript, the author, the venue and the date. Recusal from your manuscript is permanent and covers every reviewing capacity, including later versions under a changed title. For twenty-four months the paid relationship is disclosed before any review of your other work.
Your manuscript is confidential
It is stored in the folder for your engagement and nowhere else. It is never used as training data, never added to any corpus or example library, and no part of it appears in any sample, page or talk. It is not forwarded to anyone; there is no second reader. It is deleted on your request, at any time, and the deletion is confirmed to you in writing. Otherwise it is deleted six months after the report is delivered.
What this cannot do
- It is one person’s judgement. There is no panel and no second signatory, so another competent referee would raise a partly different set of objections. That is also true of the review your journal will send you.
- It reviews the manuscript, not the research. A study whose design was wrong before the data were collected cannot be repaired by a review of the write-up, and the report will say so rather than propose cosmetic fixes.
- It cannot detect fabrication. This is not a research-integrity investigation and no report should be cited as evidence that a manuscript is sound.
- The calendar is one reviewer’s. Where a manuscript cannot be given proper attention in the window you need, the engagement is declined rather than delivered thin.
Signed by name
Dr Milos Kankaras, psychometrician, ORCID 0000-0002-3190-7751. Twenty-five years in measurement and large-scale assessment, with work for the OECD, UNESCO, EUROFOUND and the Minderoo Foundation, and a published record in latent variable modelling, measurement invariance and cross-national comparability. Founder and Director of the Center for Psychology.
The report is signed. That is the warrant, and it is also the control: a reviewer whose name is on every report has a direct interest in not writing a bad one.
Tell me about the paper, then email the file
This form collects everything except the manuscript itself, which comes by email so that it never passes through a third-party form service. You get a written acknowledgement within one working day: what has arrived, what is still missing, the scope decision, the price, and the delivery date as a date. The five days start when all of it is in.
Or write directly: milos@centerforpsychology.me. Send the manuscript file to the same address.