Reminder to Journal Editors Re: Refereeing Data

Several journal editors have emailed me responses to my request for data regarding referee requests at their journals. If you haven’t yet, please at least provide an answer to this one question:

What percentage of the potential referees who you ask to referee a new submission agree to do so? Or, to get at the matter another way, on average, how many referee requests must you make per new submission?

[Jasper Johns, Numeral Series]

Some journals have provided figures for the past two years, others have done so for some subset of that time, others have picked what they take to be a representative sample of papers and provided information based on them. I know that the ease of acquiring this information varies from journal to journal, so I’m not being too picky in what I’m requesting. The idea is to gather enough information from a wide enough range of journals to be able to get a sense of whether there is indeed a “refereeing crisis,” and if so, whether there are any patterns to it.

As I mentioned in the previous post on this, when I report on this data I will not be revealing journal-specific data, nor will I mention the titles of the responding journals without first seeking permission to do so. Any information provided will be kept confidential. Please send the information to me at [email protected].

Thank you.