<p>Although @cardinal raises some good points, I think some questions could be germane to CrossValidated, as long as things are handled appropriately.</p>
<p>Please <em>please</em> <strong>please</strong> do not post an entire manuscript, or even big excepts from a manuscript, and ask for critiques. I think this is Cardinal's major concern and it is a very valid one. Among other things:</p>
<ul>
<li>It is ethically dubious and violates your agreement with the authors/journal.</li>
<li>It might 'out' you as the reviewer (if you work in a field with anonymous reviews)</li>
<li>It is unlikely to work anyway: I doubt many people here would be willing to spend hours plowing through a manuscript in order to write your review for you.</li>
</ul>
<p>All that said, I think it would probably be fine to post specific and general-interest questions, particularly if done in a way that doesn't reveal too much about the original manuscript. For example, I think a question like this would be okay:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am reading a paper where the authors use a False Discovery Rate procedure to compensate for a large number of multiple comparisons. I was under the impression that the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure only worked for independent tests, but there are some arbitrary (i.e., positive and negative) dependencies between their tests.</p>
<p>Can this procedure be used on dependent tests? If not, are there any similar alternatives?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This question is answerable (in fact, it has already been answered here!), it is not too localized, and it probably would not violate any confidentiality agreement you have with the journal.</p>
<p>All that said, I think this a somewhat thorny issue and I hope others weigh in. Thank you for trying to be as conscientious a reviewer as possible! I'll buy you a drink if we're ever at the same meeting!</p>
