I was reading the other day this blog post, about "how to peer review", and one passage struck me:
Don't review like a grad student
Reviews written by graduate students are among the most negative.
Grad students are often on the receiving end of negative reviews, because they are just learning how to write papers.
So, even though I'm no longer a grad student, I sometimes have the feeling that I tend to be a more negative reviewer than others, but it's actually hard to measure (maybe I'm just reviewing mostly bad papers?!), since I don't always have access to the other reviews of the papers I'm reviewing (due to the fact that I've been more often acting as an external reviewer than as a PC member).
I believe that the quality of my writing has improved with the feedback I've received from the reviewers of my paper, but because I don't have any feedback on my reviews, it's hard to know if and how I can improve them. So my question is: is there a way to measure my own reviewing bias?
The first thing that would come to my mind would be a set of papers reviewed by many other reviewers, and a result like: "you're in the x% more negative reviewers". Of course, I'm not implying that I would be automatically less severe when reviewing, but sometimes, in case of doubt, it's good to know one's own bias.