Journal ·
What we mean by review
Review at Candour is a way of making a book harder to knock down. It is not a vote, and it is not a claim to academic peer review unless a particular work actually went through that process.
Publishing is not the end of the author’s argument with the work. It is where the argument gets harder. A manuscript can be fluent and still be wrong, or careful and still unclear. Review is how the house tries to find the difference before a reader has to.
A manuscript the house is going to publish is challenged editorially before publication. Depending on the book, that may also include another writer who knows the subject, an independent specialist, a check of material factual claims, and a stage in which the author responds and revises. We ask reviewers to find what is weak, unsupported, unclear or missing. We do not ask them to make the author agree with the house.
Those are different instruments, and the words for them are not interchangeable. Editorial review is the house reading the book against its own standard: is the claim clear, is the evidence doing the work the sentence says it is doing, has the sceptical question been faced? External or specialist review brings in someone whose knowledge the house does not pretend to have. Evidence checking asks whether a factual claim can be traced. None of these, alone or together, is automatically academic peer review.
Academic peer review is a specific process, usually inside a discipline, with its own reviewers, criteria and record. Some books may one day go through something that justifies that description. Most will not, and we will not borrow the status of a process that did not happen. If a title page or a book page is silent about a review step, the silence is the accurate statement.
The purpose of review is not consensus. It is to make the work harder to knock down. A book that has only been praised has not been reviewed. A book that has been challenged, and has survived in a form the author still recognises as theirs, is closer to ready.
The working account of this standard is published separately, so it can be applied to individual titles without being rewritten as praise.