What are examples of EA work being reviewed by non-EA researchers?

Hopefully Wild Animal Initiative will have more answers for you soon! We recently assembled an Academic Advisory Panel in part to solicit feedback on our publications when they don't go through a formal peer-review process.

We're still growing the panel, so please let us know if you or anyone you know might be interested in joining. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/advisory-panel

Probably more informal than you want, but here's a Facebook thread debating AI safety involving some of the biggest names in AI.

As someone who has sometimes made a similar claim, I find a lot of assessments of others' work, not just that of EAs, tends to be informal, off-the-record, and discussion-based. I in fact think that EAs with some frequency miss out on a wealth of knowledge due to a widespread and often insistent requirement that knowledge be citable in order to be meaningful. There are very strong reasons to greatly prefer and put greater weight on citable knowledge, but there is A LOT of intelligence that people do not share in recorded formats for a variety of reasons, such as effort and reputational risks.

So I believe some lack of answers to this may be due to critiques of EA work being shared e.g. verbally, rather than more formally. Personally, I've discussed EA work with at least 4 quite prominent economists, at least 2 of whom I believed had reviewed some significant aspect of EA research and perspective thoroughly, but I have not really shared these accounts. To be sharable, I'd likely require more time and attention of these economists than I'm easily able to get, in order to ensure I provided both full and proper explanation and sufficient guarantee of anonymity.

The “Worm Wars” could arguably be an example (though the contentious research was not just from the EA community)

I've been involved (in some capacity) with most of the publications at the Centre for the Governance of AI at FHI coming out over the past 1.5 years. I'd say that for most of our research there is someone outside the EA community involved. Reasonably often, one or more of the authors of the piece wouldn't identify as part of the EA community. As for input to the work: If it is academically published, we'd get input from reviewers. We also seek additional input for all our work from folks we think will be able to provide useful input. This often includes academics we know in relevant fields. (This of course leads to a bit of a selection effect)

Good question!

Does anyone have good examples of respected* scholars who have reviewed EA research and either praised it highly or found it lackluster? 

Presumably you'd also be interested in examples where such scholars reviewed EA research and came to a conclusion in between high praise and finding it lackluster? I expect most academics find a lot of work in general to be somewhere around just "pretty good".