1. For the most part, many people do not make value judgments and then back them up with supporting evidence or calculation.
2. Do not simply report what was done by paraphrasing the author's article -- analyze it.
3. Critique the author's ideas rather than his style of writing.
4. State what is the immediate value and what is the lasting value of the article.
5. Don't be authoritarian. You must have good reasons for raising the question you do. For example, one critic asked "Did he check his pressure gages for accuracy? Also, how would pressure errors effect his result?" First you must assume the authors are competent. Second, if you suggest that the error (in this case in the pressure) will affect his results, you must tell how it will affect the results and then support your challenge by calculation or some other means.
6. Many people start out by stating that they will check the reaction mechanism proposed by the author, check the assumptions made (such as neglecting pressure drops), rederive the basic material balance equation and similar statements. These type of statements are not sufficiently penetrating as it is a deeper level of questioning that is required in a critique.
7. If you do want to challenge an assumption, you should be challenging the assumptions which would affect the maximum sensitivity of the experiment or result. For example, if a five-fold increase in the pressure would only result in a 2% increase in the rate of reaction, it doesn't make much sense to check to redo the calculations of the pressure drop in a packed bed reactor under these circumstances. On the other hand, if the temperature rises two or three degrees, the reaction rate may increase significantly and under these circumstances it would be logical to check the isothermality of the reactor.
8. Some students propose questions that I do not think they would be able to resolve unless they went into the laboratory and took the data themselves. For example, the one student said, "The author said that no significant change had been accomplished at one atmosphere but how about at higher pressures?" The question is how is this statement to be resolved unless one goes into the laboratory and takes the data.
9. Most students are not using R. W. Paul's Six Types of Socratic Questions (see Preface) to help think critically about the review.
† These comments have been passed out to student in my graduate class to help them formulate their journal critiques.
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