A LaTeX package for peer review

I recently needed to do a peer review for a co-author’s manuscript. I rarely use MS Word or LO Writer anymore except for really simple documents (e.g., a quick abstract I will have to copy and paste into a browser form anyway), and instead use LaTeX for nearly all of my writing needs. So naturally, I needed a way to do my peer review in LaTeX.

There were no packages I could find that offered the functionality I was looking for, a simple environment to place comments, numbering of comments, and a place to organize line numbers.

Enter my custom package peer_review: a LaTeX package for commenting and responding throughout the peer review process (hosted on GitHub). This package offers a few simple environments and commands that make doing a peer review pretty painless — and naturally LaTeX quality beauty!

This is a demo of the package, and the demo file is included in the repository. This demo uses a class file from my collaborator Eric Barefoot called compact_proposal (also hosted on GitHub), but the package can be used on top of the base article class too.

If others end up picking up this package, or I really get it refined I may try and release it on CTAN. But for now, it can be downloaded from GitHub as a zip or cloned with:

git clone https://github.com/amoodie/peer_review.git

There are instructions for installing on the project README, and a man page with instructions on using the package, complete with examples.