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I was asked to review for a conference that I have not reviewed for before. The topic fits, the assigned papers fall within my expertise and the conference is respected, so I accepted to review.

Now I have finished the first review and wanted to fill out the form and submit, but lo and behold, they have a mandatory word minimum of 300 words per review report, if there are fewer words, I can't submit. My assessment does not have 300 words, even after I expanded all bullet points to full sentences (which is not helping the quality of the review in any way whatsoever IMO). There is simply not that much to say about it. I have added a short summary of the paper, I have shortcomings and strong points.

I get that they want to prevent reviews that are super rudimentary, but this makes we want to not review for them anymore.

My question: Do you think it would be considered bad practice / rude / whatever other type of bad form to add a sentence to the review along the lines of "To bring the review to the required minimum word count I am adding this sentence to the review as I do not have anything else to comment on".

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    I would have no hesitation whatsoever to repeat "minimum word counts for reviews make no sense" as often as necessary to reach the limit. But then I'm not dependent on the goodwill of conference organizers... Commented 2 days ago
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    Play stupid games, win stupid prices. But this of course depends if in the future you want to colarborate with the organizers or in one form or the other want to be on their good side? The only thing a minimum word count achieves is making stuff worse, like AI slop. Or it triggers my ludic drive and they will get what they asked for :-) Commented 2 days ago
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    For scaling purposes, you've spent 213 words grumbling about it in this question. How much real effort is it to find a few more words for your evaluation? Commented 2 days ago
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    I wouldn’t exactly call your suggestion rude, but perhaps tactless. Many authors can be quite sensitive and take reviews strongly to heart — especially if any are junior, or feel outsiders in some sense, but even well-established researchers sometimes do too. A phrasing like “I have nothing else to say” could easily get misread as negative even though it’s not meant as such. Commented 2 days ago
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    Perhaps you can take more time to summarize the paper or the broader literature it fits into. 300 words doesn't sound like a lot to me (but maybe this is area dependent?). Commented 2 days ago

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Some will perceive it as rude/passive-aggressive; others won't. At the very least, it will shift attention away from the paper and toward the review policy, and that is more of a discussion that should be held with the conference chairs via email or other means than via the paper reviews.

I understand your frustration, but if it's just a few missing words, as an author I would prefer to read something nice like, "I hope these comments are helpful to the authors in further clarifying and strengthening their work". Equally content-free, but without potentially casting you in a bad light.

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    You are clearly a better person than I am. I really appreciate your comment, I did not even think about that such a comment might have negative impact on the authors. Commented 2 days ago
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    I also expect a too-short review would be seen as a somewhat negative assessment of the paper itself. It's usually not an endorsement of novelty or impact for a person who ostensibly read the paper carefully to walk away from it with very little to say - "this paper made such little impression on me, I decided to circumvent the review requirements instead". Commented 2 days ago
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    @NuclearHoagie on the contrary, some of the most positive reviews I have ever received were extremely short. E.g. "This paper is groundbreaking and well-written. Accept as is." Commented yesterday
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    @Gilbert One issue is that a review of that nature, which makes no specific mention of any actual content of the manuscript, could have come equally well from someone who fully understood and properly evaluated the work, or from someone who didn't actually read it at all. There's not much compelling rationale there for the editor to actually evaluate - I'd expect a quality review to give some hint the reviewer actually read the paper. I doubt a weakly supported "Accept" review would outweigh an in-depth review that were less positive. Saying more positive things is, well, more positive. Commented yesterday
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    @JochenGlueck: I never implied. If there is a lot to say, than a long review is necessary. But when a word count is a measure for quality, it is kinda a Goodhart's law situation where in the end you just get that. Commented 23 hours ago
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I wouldn’t pad a review to reach a minimum. Either decline, or aim comfortably beyond it.

That “I do not have anything else to comment on” seems like the core issue. A 300-word minimum is a blunt instrument, but should be a non-issue for any reasonable paper. Accepting a review request gives us a professional obligation for a comprehensive review that benefits editors, authors, readers, and the field as a whole, with specific, actionable feedback to help authors improve. So a thorough review normally covers a lot:

  • overall contribution and significance;
  • methodology;
  • logic and interpretation;
  • weaknesses and limitations;
  • specific revision suggestions;
  • minor or technical corrections;
  • and separate comments to the author, and to the editor.

Given the review doesn’t reach 300 words even after including a summary and fleshing out fragments, it is almost certainly is the kind of "super rudimentary" review they're trying to avoid. If even this low bar causes the feeling of "don’t want to review for them anymore", that may be the right choice.

Declining is more professional than superficial/padded reviews, especially if the topic's outside our expertise, we lack the time for in-depth review, or we genuinely have little substantive to add.

Explicit filler acknowledging the paper’s brevity could be OK for extreme exceptions (Upper’s zero-character paper, Conway & Soifer's 2-word paper), but even Upper's paper got over 100 words of review.

Short reviews invite skepticism that:

  • the paper was read in depth;
  • common review guidelines were followed (e.g. PubMed’s Guide to an Effective Peer Review);
  • logic and methodology were examined in depth;
  • editorial decisions can be based on them.

If a paper is really too shallow for even 300 words, I'd likely recommend the editor reject: some institutions judge faculty by number of publications, so they try to fragment papers into tiny pieces. Even then, the more we can guide the author on how to make it publishable, the better.

[This answer: ~333 words, trimmed from 550.]

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    Re: "If a paper is really too shallow for even 300 words, I'd likely recommend the editor reject": some of the most flattering reviews I received were very short. On one paper (which I worked extremely hard to polish prior to submission) the review was one line long - something like "This is an excellent paper with very interesting results on [topic]. It is very well written. I have no comments for improvements." This was in a top journal, and needless to say I was very pleased that my hard work in polishing the paper had paid off. Commented yesterday
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    ... Ever since that incident I always write my papers with the mindset that my goal is to leave the reviewer with nothing to say except "This is a great paper!" Commented yesterday
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Considered rude etc. by whom?

For the authors, I doubt it would be thought of as rude, but I like Marvin's suggestion even better.

For the organizers of the conference, maybe. In a way, it's telling them that either their word count requirements are silly or that some of the papers you reviewed aren't worthy. You say you don't have any big stake here and are only reviewing, but the organizers are probably in your field (else what's going on?) and it doesn't pay to irritate your colleagues. Maybe they will be reviewers on your next paper.

So, I would contact the organizers directly and ask them what to do.

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In the question you proposed

To bring the review to the required minimum word count I am adding this sentence to the review as I do not have anything else to comment on".

which does sound a little passive aggressive.

Marvin suggested

I hope these comments are helpful to the authors in further clarifying and strengthening their work.

which maybe is a little too benign.

As another idea, if you want to get across the idea that you dislike the minimum word count, but while sounding as friendly as possible, maybe you can saying something like

And this concludes my review; I have no other comments to make. I thank the authors for writing a nice work and the conference organizers for the organization.

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Here is my analysis. You are trying to achieve the following goals:

  1. Write the best and most helpful review (according to your best professional judgment) that you can.

  2. Meet the formal requirement to submit a 300-word or longer text so that you can submit the form.

  3. Avoid offending the editors and/or paper authors.

  4. Avoid giving the impression to the editors and/or paper authors that you were lazy with your review or did not take the assignment seriously enough.

Your suggested phrasing in the question is a good start in that it achieves goals 1 and 2, but IMO it doesn't do enough to ensure that you will also achieve goals 3 and 4. Therefore I'd suggest a variant text along these lines:

My Review

[body of the substantive part of the review goes here - concise and professional, less than 300 words]

Note: the above review is less than 300 words long. It is nonetheless in my opinion the most helpful review that I am able to write. To remove any doubt, I took the task of reading and reviewing this paper seriously and read the paper in full.

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Instead of superficial padding to the review text, I would recommend to contact the person or panel who invited you to do the review and inform them that you have written a review, but the word limitations on the review platform prevent you from submitting your review via the normal channel. Remember that by reviewing the paper you are doing a service to them and they hopefully will try to accommodate / resolve any issues you encounter with that.

If they inform you that they really need reviews that are of a certain length (who knows, maybe their auditing process requires that...), they will let you know and you can decide to write more words or retract your agreement to review.

On the other hand, if it's actually an arbitrary technical limitation, it's better to let them resolve it. Maybe the editor has means to enter your review even if it does not match the requirements, and you just need to provide it by email, or they can change whatever configuration option that is on the submission platform.

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Better to pad than to say the same thing in more words. When the reader sees the padding he will know that everything the reviewer wants to say has been said.

As Mark Twain advised, eschew surplusage.

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I most certainly would recommend against doing this for anything you give a poor review of - it would be fairly insulting to an author to turn them down while refusing to put in the work.

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Do you think it would be considered bad practice / rude / whatever other type of bad form to add a sentence to the review along the lines of "To bring the review to the required minimum word count I am adding this sentence to the review as I do not have anything else to comment on".

It would simply be good feedback for the editors, who may have some weird ideas about length as a measure of quality.

Yes it is passive-aggressive, and this is a good thing

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