  Purpose
  The purpose of this paper is to explore which structures of academic articles
referees would pay more attention to, what specific content referees focus on,
and whether the distribution of PRC is related to the citations.
Design/methodology/approach
  Firstly, utilizing the feature words of section title and hierarchical
attention network model (HAN) to identify the academic article structures.
Secondly, analyzing the distribution of PRC in different structures according
to the position information extracted by rules in PRC. Thirdly, analyzing the
distribution of feature words of PRC extracted by the Chi-square test and
TF-IDF in different structures. Finally, four correlation analysis methods are
used to analyze whether the distribution of PRC in different structures is
correlated to the citations. Findings
  The count of PRC distributed in Materials and Methods and Results section is
significantly more than that in the structure of Introduction and Discussion,
indicating that referees pay more attention to the Material and Methods and
Results. The distribution of feature words of PRC in different structures is
obviously different, which can reflect the content of referees' concern. There
is no correlation between the distribution of PRC in different structures and
the citations. Research limitations/implications
  Due to the differences in the way referees write peer review reports, the
rules used to extract position information cannot cover all PRC.
Originality/value
  The paper finds a pattern in the distribution of PRC in different academic
article structures proving the long-term empirical understanding. It also
provides insight into academic article writing: researchers should ensure the
scientificity of methods and the reliability of results when writing academic
article to obtain a high degree of recognition from referees.
