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Last summer, the Student Council of the International Society for Computational Biology prompted an Editorial, “Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published” [1]. The interest in that piece (it has been downloaded 14,880 times thus far) prompted “Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Grant” [2]. With this third contribution, the “Ten Rules” series would seem to be established, and more rules for different audiences are in the making. Ten Simple Rules for Reviewers is based upon our years of experience as reviewers and as managers of the review process. Suggestions also came from PLoS staff and Editors and our research groups, the latter being new and fresh to the process of reviewing. The rules for getting articles published included advice on becoming a reviewer early in your career. If you followed that advice, by working through your mentors who will ask you to review, you will then hopefully find these Ten Rules for Reviewers helpful. There is no magic formula for what constitutes a good or a bad paper—the majority of papers fall in between—so what do you look for as a reviewer? We would suggest, above all else, you are looking for what the journal you are reviewing for prides itself on. Scientific novelty—there is just too much “me-too” in scientific papers—is often the prerequisite, but not always. There is certainly a place for papers that, for example, support existing hypotheses, or provide a new or modified interpretation of an existing finding. After journal scope, it comes down to a well-presented argument and everything else described in “Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published” [1]. Once you know what to look for in a paper, the following simple reviewer guidelines we hope will be useful. Certainly (as with all PLoS Computational Biology material) we invite readers to use the PLoS eLetters feature to suggest their own rules and comments on this important subject.

We suspect many of our readers will be familiar with the cult TV show The Prisoner, in which actor Patrick McGoohan had his identity taken away by unknown assailants for unknown reasons, and his pleas of “I am not a number, I am a person” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29JewlGsYxs&feature=related) were greeted with variants of “whatever you say, number six.” We would suggest that, as scientists, we are in a situation where the opposite will soon be true, at least for the purposes of scientific scholarship. Scientists will want to be assigned a number, or at least a unique identifier. Why? Imagine a time when you and your complete scholarly output—papers, grant applications, blog posts, etc.—could be identified online and in perpetuity and returned in a variety of easy-to-digest ways. While ego comes into it as a driver to make this happen, measuring scientific career advancement is something that lacks good metrics in a digital world. Unless one has a truly unique name, applying such a metric is not possible now. Even with a unique name, what is the guarantee that all of our scholarly output will be captured by one source of that information? In the end, we as individuals are the only ones who reliably track our scholarly output. This situation is beginning to change, and, as we shall see, new metrics have the promise of much more than simply returning references to our collective life's work as currently described by research papers, research proceedings, books, and book chapters. Although even a complete and current resume generated on demand would be a big step, if it could be returned in a variety of formats for a variety of purposes. These complete resumes are something many of us spend endless hours generating. The idea of having our scholarly output properly characterized is not out of reach, since the articles we write are already identified uniquely by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI; discussed further below). A book or journal is identified by an ISBN, and citations are identified by PubMed identifiers, and so on. The ideas discussed here simply take this identification process for individual publications and citations to the point of providing unique descriptors for each author and to uniquely identify all of each author's scholarly work.