Responsible Authorship and Peer Review

James R. Wilson provides nice introduction about authorship and peer review.
When you write a paper, we should remember

If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that youthink might
make it invalid—not only what you think is right aboutit: other causes that
could possibly explain your results; and thingsyou thought of that you’ve
eliminated by some other experiment, andhow they worked—to make sure the other
fellow can tell they havebeen eliminated.

He also gives several things to check as a reviewer. Although I never review any paper, it is good to keep those questions in your mind when you write a paper.

1. Are the problems discussed in the paper of substantial interest? Wouldsolutions
   of these problems materially advance knowledge of theory,methods, or
   applications?
2. Does the author either solve these problems or else make a contributiontoward a solution that improves substantially upon previous work?
3. Are the methods of solution new? Can the proposed solution methods beused to solve other problems of interest?
4. Does the exposition of the paper help to clarify our understanding of thisarea of research or application? Does the paper hold our interest andmake us want to give the paper the careful reading that we give toimportant papers in our area of specialization?
5. Are the topic and nature of this paper appropriate for this journal? Arethe abstract and introduction accessible to a general reader of thisjournal? Is the rest of the paper accessible to a readily identified group ofreaders of this journal?
6. Are the clarity and readability of the manuscript acceptable? Is thewriting grammatically correct?
7. Does the manuscript contain an adequate set of references? Is adequatecredit given to prior work in the field upon which the present paper isbuilt?
8. Is the material appropriately organized into an effective mix of text,figures and tables? Are data given in tables better presented in figures orin the text?
9. Is the work technically correct? Are the main conclusions justified by theexperimental data and by logically valid arguments? Are the theoremsstated and proved correctly given the assumptions? In practicalapplications of the theoretical results, do the authors check the validity ofthe underlying assumptions?
10. Are there gaps in the discussion of the experimental methods or results?If there are such gaps, can the closing of these gaps be considered (i)essential, (ii) desirable, or (iii) interesting? Are the experimental methodsdescribed in sufficient detail so that other investigators can reproduce theexperiments?
11. Have the authors explicitly addressed the limitations of their study—thatis, have they adhered to Feynman’s ideal of “utter honesty” and “leaningover backwards” in reporting their results?