The value of scientific knowledge is highly dependent on the quality of the process used to produce it, namely, the quality of the peer-review process. This process is a pivotal part of science as it works both to legitimize and improve the work of the scientific community. In this context, the present study investigated the relationship between review time, length, and feedback quality of review reports in the peer-review process of research articles. For this purpose, the review time of 313 referee reports from three Chilean international journals were recorded. Feedback quality was determined estimating the rate of direct requests by the total number of comments in each report. Number of words was used to describe the average length in the sample. Results showed that average time and length have little variation across review reports, irrespective of their quality. Low quality reports tended to take longer to reach the editor, so neither time nor length were related to feedback quality. This suggests that referees mostly describe, criticize, or praise the content of the article instead of making useful and direct comments to help authors improve their manuscripts.

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The growing importance of entrepreneurship and innovation for economic growth has propitiated a discursive genre that nowadays is almost omnipresent, i.e., the pitch. As with other emerging genres used in professional settings (e.g., selling presentations, business plans, etc.), several instructional discourses regarding the pitch have come out in the form of manuals and courses offering training on "how to make a pitch more powerful". Empirical research, however, is less common. The aim of this paper is to qualitatively review and sort out the existing empirical research on the pitch. For this, three classifying categories are proposed according to its reception (mainly by investors), the focus on discursive features, and its evolution. Finally, some critiques to the empirical research on the pitch and a description of some future trends on the field are provided. This work may be useful for professionals interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, areas in which this emerging discourse broadly circulates.

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KeywordsPeer review process Referee report of scientifc articles Scientifc writing Discourse analysisThe referee report of research articles is a discursive genre in which a part of the collective process of building knowledge is crystalized. Given its confdentialityl there is litle empirical work on this genre. Among these few contributionsl a series of limitations can be identifedl such as the lack of defnition of the unit of analysis or the lack of integration between discursive and sociometric data. In this articlel we present a model that contributes to overcoming these limitations. The model was applied with the purpose of analyzing the variation of referee reports according to two extralinguistic variablesl i.e.l publication recommendation (acceptedl conditionedl rejected) and referee's number of published articles. The results showed that both extralinguistic atributes were associated with specifc discourse variationsl of which publication recommendation was more decisive than referee's academic productivity.