Excerpt from the blog post on refereeing by Marc F. Bellemare:
I cannot possibly claim to be among the best referees, but by my count, I have refereed 56 57 papers and two book manuscripts since 2005, and I do take pride in my refereeing, which might explain why I was asked to become associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics for 2012-2015.
As such, I figured I should chime in with my own advice about how to referee papers. I cannot say I always follow every single one of the 20 rules that follow but those are, by and large, the rules I try to live by as a referee. Some of those rules are derived from a similar list by Chris Barrett, who gave the students in his graduate empirical development micro class a list of such rules.
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http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/2012/01/contributing-to-public-goods-my-20-rules-for-refereeing/