Sorry for the late reply here but I am happy that it has spurred a conversation. Thanks to Melissa, Bob, and Margaret for chipping in and it's great to have these inputs. But as I read through this, I am asking myself whether it may actually be futile to define "peer review" as it is carried out today (I am very much generalizing here). Reading publicly available peer reviews, we may come across (directly or indirectly) suggestions that the concerned article "may not be suitable for the journal" implying some peer reviews also evaluate the journal (on prestige, of course) in addition to evaluating the work. I am not even going to the ones that downright deride or put down authors and their works - we can leave those as exceptions (even though they may form a good chunk of the reviews out there). 

So, from a teaching point of view, would it probably be better to give a vague definition to students and conduct a small workshop of sorts using the publicly available peer reviews from a variety of journals (or just some highlighted portions from them) to give them a flavor of what a real peer review is, ask them to form their own definitions and finally cleaning them up to have multiple definitions that may all be true?

Best wishes,
Pavi 

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