What Reviewers Mean by “Writing Quality”: An Analysis of Published Peer Review Reports in BMJ Open

Recent developments in scholarly publishing have led to increasing adoption of open peer review (OPR), a set of practices intended to enhance transparency and participation in the peer review process. Despite the centrality of peer review to academic writing and its acknowledged relevance within English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) and EAP, reviewers’ comments remain a largely occluded genre. This study examines published peer review reports from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open, a widely recognized journal in the medical field and one of the earliest adopters of fully open peer review. Drawing on a corpus of 109 research articles and their review histories from a full 2024 issue, the analysis focuses on the frequency and nature of language-related comments in reviewers’ reports. Results show that reviewers frequently comment on text organization, word choice, clarity and compliance with “academic style” norms. These findings suggest that OPR reports offer a valuable resource for ERPP and EAP pedagogy by making visible the linguistic, rhetorical and epistemic expectations that shape publication-oriented academic writing.