The article deals with lexical characteristics of review as part of norm-centric academic discursive practice. The focus is on the range of evaluation criteria proposed by journals to regulate the activities of one of the actors in expert academic communicative practice (reviewer), and on the connection between the general (positive/negative) evaluation of the article under review and the reviewer’s choice of lexical means. The material for study is a collection of reviews submitted to “Izvestia: Herzen University Journal of Humanities & Sciences” from 2019 to 2023. The procedure is based on the study of two comparable text corpora (positive/negative). It includes building frequency and alphabetical wordlists and lemma lists that provide evidence for quantitative analysis; extracting contexts for key linguistic units (KWIC), and studying the evaluative potential of lexical means in the aspect of expert academic communicative practice. The novelty of the research is due to the following: novel is the focus of treating review lexical composition in its general (positive/negative) context; novel is the application of quantitative analysis to lexical composition of review texts: it has demonstrated that the choice of lexical means is determined by the spectrum of universal academic criteria relevant for Russian academic discourse and by the institutional rules of reviewing established by journals and scientific foundations; it has proven that there is no direct relationship between the general evaluation and the distribution of lexical means; it has identified significant trends in the frequency of lexical and grammatical units, characterizing their functioning in review texts with different general evaluation.