Folio Review gives your draft the kind of read it would get from a small panel, before you send it to the people whose time is expensive. It's meant for the revision stage: after the argument exists, when you want to know where it's weak.
Open it from the editor's Review menu (Reviewer). It's part of Fellow (15 reviews a day) and Chair (50 a day).
The three reviewers
Rather than one generic pass, Run 3-reviewer panel runs three distinct perspectives, because that's closer to how real review works:
- Methods & Rigor: is the approach sound? Are the claims supported by what you actually did? Where does the evidence not reach as far as the sentence?
- Clarity & Craft: can a reader follow the argument? Where does it assume too much, bury the point, or lose the thread?
- The Skeptic: the reviewer looking for the hole. What's the strongest objection, the alternative explanation, the "yes, but"?
Each reviewer reports separately, with a verdict and comments anchored to specific paragraphs, so you get three angles instead of one averaged opinion. Disagreement between them is a signal, not a bug: it usually points at the part of the draft that isn't settled yet.
One reviewer, with a rubric
Switch to One reviewer for a single review scored against a rubric: an undergraduate Essay, a graduate Seminar paper, a Thesis chapter, a Journal article, or a Custom rubric with your own dimensions. Pick the tone (Encouraging, Balanced or Tough). Either way, the reviewer critiques; it never rewrites your work.
The Reviewer Report
The panel's results appear in the editor, for you. If you want to share them, Publish Reviewer Report puts them at a public link (/review/<code>), stamped with your draft's writing-provenance fingerprint, so the report is verifiable rather than just asserted. The published report includes the reviewers' verdicts and comments, and Update report after a later run refreshes the same link. Share the link with a co-author or advisor, or keep it as a record of what the draft looked like before a round of revisions.
What it is, and isn't
Review is a mirror, not a judge. It will tell you where an argument is thin or a claim outruns its evidence; it will not tell you your paper is "good" or "ready," because those aren't things a model can honestly certify. Treat it the way you'd treat a sharp colleague's marginal notes: some you'll act on, some you'll disagree with, and the disagreement itself is useful.
It reads the argument, its structure, and how sources are used. It does not check numerical, tabular, or statistical claims, so a wrong figure can pass a clean review. A very long draft is reviewed up to about its first 50,000 characters.
It also doesn't replace peer review or a human advisor. It's the pass you run first, so that by the time a person reads it, they're spending their attention on the hard parts instead of the ones a panel could have caught.
Tips
- Run it on a real draft, not an outline. The reviewers need an argument to push on.
- Read the Skeptic last and slowest. It's the one most likely to change what you write next.
- Revise, then re-run. A second run on the revised draft shows whether you actually closed the gaps or just moved them.
Related: The proof-of-work report · How Folio checks your quotes