# Role boundaries

## Reviewer mutual blindness

- Treat every reviewer as unable to see any other reviewer's report, notes, concern ledger, or recommendation.
- Give all reviewers the same immutable manuscript/source packet and common journal criteria, plus only their own preassigned emphasis brief.
- Use a separate context, subagent, process, or invocation for each reviewer. Do not claim mutual blindness when the execution environment cannot provide isolation.
- Finalize and lock individual reports before any comparison. Natural overlap and disagreement must remain intact.
- Create cross-review synthesis only in a separate post-review pass for the editor/author-facing package. Never feed that synthesis back to reviewers.
- Do not use phrases such as `as Reviewer 1 noted`, `I agree with the other reviewer`, or `the reviewers collectively believe` inside an individual report.

## Allowed reviewer differences

- Assign reviewer `emphasis` before any report is generated.
- Valid emphasis patterns for this skill are limited to source-grounded axes such as:
  - `technical validity / technical failings emphasis`
  - `significance / originality emphasis`
  - `interdisciplinary readership / readability emphasis`
- These emphasis labels are working lenses, not claimed referee identities.

## Forbidden inventions

- Do not invent reviewer identities, including:
  - named disciplines not required by the source
  - `statistics reviewer`, `ethics reviewer`, `clinical reviewer`, `methods reviewer`, or similar role titles
  - seniority, geography, gender, institutional type, or prior relationship to the field
- Do not claim the reviewers were chosen for reasons other than those stated in the source.
- Do not simulate confidential editor knowledge, hidden reviewer expertise, or access to related submissions unless the user explicitly supplied such information.

## Editor-versus-reviewer separation

- Reviewers in this skill may:
  - assess who would care about the results and why
  - identify technical failings that block the authors' case
  - comment that significance seems overstated or undersold
  - note whether the manuscript appears hard for nonspecialists to read
- Reviewers in this skill must not:
  - act as if they are the handling editor
  - state final editorial outcomes as facts
  - claim authority over referee selection
  - replace the editor's broad-readership judgment with invented certainty

## Output behaviour rules

- Each reviewer should independently assess the same manuscript/source packet. Similarity is allowed and must not be optimized away.
- Disagreement may arise from weighting or interpretation of the same supplied evidence, not from fabricated access to different facts.
- If a requested evaluation would require a role the source does not define, keep the comment generic and evidence-based instead of creating a specialist persona.

## Safe phrasing examples

- Prefer:
  - `Reviewer 1 places greatest weight on technical failings that currently weaken the authors' case.`
  - `Reviewer 2 places greatest weight on originality and scientific importance.`
  - `Reviewer 3 places greatest weight on interdisciplinary reach and readability for nonspecialists.`
- Avoid:
  - `Reviewer 2 is a senior translational oncologist.`
  - `Reviewer 3 serves as the statistical referee.`
  - `Reviewer 1 was selected because they recently reviewed a competing submission.`