In my actual experience, I have noted very few structured peer-reviews and these in those units where I am serving as a reviewer. But, unstructured peer-reviews abound in many conferences and journals with a high impact factor (greater than or so near to 2).

Personally, I think that structured peer-reviews are better as they push to reviewers to be more responsible and spend the due time to read and understand the submitted paper. Moreover, they permit to all submitted papers be judged on the same basis, that is, the same group of questions that are deeply thought to help the selection of a paper if it merits to be accepted for publication. Very contrarily, unstructured peer-reviews permit to irresponsible reviewers to do anything but the right things to do.

Following

This is a worthwhile conversation for editorial boards. Most of my work is in secondary education where I've taught writing in English and history classes. When working with students, I frequently use peer editing. This is always structured. Doing this any other way limits the success of student editors and writers. A structured process makes peer editing more purposeful for the writer, editor, and teacher. Good writing requires process, no matter our age or academic level. I don't understand why academic journals haven't made it a best practice to use rubrics or other guidance to create structured peer-reviews.

Thank you @Richards for your opinion. Do you think that when qualifying as "worthwhile" a conversation related to a question, this one merit to be recommended?

Structured review may ensure promptness and purposefulness but I see unstructured review as more detailed. I prefer a mix though, as one gets better with experience in the unstructured approach.

Dear @Olusegun. As you rightly mentioned, reviewers do not need to be restricted. I think that structured reviews may be organized in such a way that some questions offer to anyone the possibility to detail their opinions.

Absolutely, my review comments are well-organized and structured. As an author, I also want to get such contructive review comments. If it is un-structured, it could be vague and equivocal in terms of what to correct/revise. Such a review may not be helpful for authors.

I think that peer-reviews should be structured ...

I have an important remark for RG website and its administrators or others that make score calculations, based more on fictive recommendations than reads:

If it is easy to note that the answer added by @Karthik is nothing but his own experience (first sentence) and opinion (second sentence), full of English errors and without any explanation and logical reasons on his experience or opinion.

However, there are 4 recommendations on his answer, making it "the popular answer" up to date. For me, it is clear that the persons that have made these recommendations are his friends or known by him, or are very unintelligent persons to recommend such answers without any sense. It is such a kind of situations that pushed me asking another question on RG, concerning the criteria that should have a question or answer to be recommended: this one has a unique and only criterium: either clan membership or stupidity.

So, I propose to RG to find the right way to evaluate this kind of faulty or premeditated recommendations that do add nothing to the science and what researchers are asking for.

So, the real question is: Whom such a fictive score for RG members will serve?

I thank you all for giving me reason to what I have said right here.

Dear Krenar,

I agree with you fully, nevertheless there is a third thing that you didn't mention. I intended to recommend your answer because it deserves that, but I don't want to mention stupidity in RG.

Best regards

Kamel

Dear @Kamil,

I thank you for your comments. You are right and I corrected the word you mentioned by its synonym, which I think is more ethically acceptable for characterizing the mental state of certain persons making recommendations of the kind I mentioned above, still if they are not friends of someone, whose answer or question is recommended.

Best regards

Krenar