[Background.] Peer review remains a cornerstone in academia, including software engineering and requirements engineering, yet it frequently falls short in fostering joint progress and well-being. While peer review primarily emphasizes scientific rigor, it often lacks the empathy essential for supporting and encouraging all peers involved — risking emotional stress, discouragement, or even withdrawal, particularly among junior and early-career researchers. [Objective.] In this experience report, I aim to highlight that peer review is a practice that demands both scientific care for quality and collegial welfare for the joint progress and well-being of all peers involved, including authors, co-reviewers, workshop or conference organizers, and journal editors. [Method.] Drawing on my ten years of experience in academia, including over 100 publications, over 175 self-authored reviews, and over 25 organizational roles, I propose the ethos of the PEERfect REVIEWer, grounded in the two core values: Scientific care and collegial welfare. Through reflection shaped by professional exchanges with colleagues, consideration of literature, and an examination of both self-authored and received reviews, I formulated an accompanying guideline with 16 practical recommendations to guide reviewers in their actions to achieve these two values. [Results.] The ethos of the PEERfect REVIEWer and its accompanying guideline help reviewers in upholding high scientific standards and conducting peer review in a constructive, supportive, respectful, and timely manner. They demonstrate that scientific rigor and empathy are complementary forces that promote impactful peer review practice. [Conclusions.] By placing scientific care and collegial welfare at the core of peer review, this experience report reaffirms the importance of scientific rigor while also advocating for greater attention to empathy. It invites reviewers to reconsider their role not merely as gatekeepers but as partners in the academic journey of each peer involved. The PEERfect REVIEWer is both a caretaker of quality and a steward of joint progress and well-being — as truly impactful peer review practice requires scientific rigor and empathy in equal measure.

I am the Head of Curation & Community Building for Program Area D - Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. In this role, I work as a researcher and data scientist at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, as well as a lecturer at Leibniz Universität Hannover. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Leibniz Universität Hannover. Furthermore, I am involved in the research projects Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), National Research Data Infrastructure for Engineering Sciences (NFDI4ING) consortium, National Research Data Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Energy System Research (NFDI4Energy) consortium, both of which are part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), find.software: Foundations for INterdisciplinary Discovery of (Research) Software, CRC/TRR 298 SIIRI – Safety-Integrated and Infection-Reactive Implants, and SciD-QuESt - From Scientific Documents to Knowledge – Questionnaire-Based Extraction and Structuring.

As part of this work, my research focuses on the development of the ORKG and its application in diverse disciplines, such as computer science, engineering sciences, energy system research, and medicine. I focus on the human-centered, neuro-symbolic knowledge organization to improve the availability, discoverability, and accessibility of FAIR scientific data, information, and knowledge for humans and machines.

I am a member of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), and a regular reviewer and member of various program committees and organizing committees of workshops, conferences, and journals.

Before joining TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, I was a research associate and Ph.D. student at the Software Engineering Group at Leibniz Universität Hannover. I worked as project leader of the DFG research project ViViReq and researched the integration of videos as a complementary communication medium in requirements engineering. My research focused on supporting requirements communication between stakeholders and the development team to foster the development of a shared understanding of the project vision of the system under development among all project partners involved.

I have published my research in over 85 national and international publications on diverse topics, including requirements engineering, empirical software engineering, social software engineering, machine learning, natural language processing, research knowledge graphs, neuro-symbolic AI, and FAIR scientific data, information, and knowledge.