How Much Do You Referee?
How many journal submissions do you referee each year?
[Serena Bocchino, “99° (Fever) Hold Me Tight” (detail)]
Tenured philosophy professors, answer this one:
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Untenured tenure-track philosophy professors, answer this one:
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Non-tenure track philosophy professors, lecturers, instructors, and adjuncts, answer this one:
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Philosophy graduate students, answer this one:
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Those with graduate training in philosophy who work outside of academia, answer this one:
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Related: A Little Rough Data about Journal Refereeing in Philosophy
Which category should postdocs (like me) use to answer?
I’d say the “non-tenure-track” one.
Why does one button say “Anonymous Vote” when it then says “Not allowed” if you try to vote that way? I tried the option of “Sign in to WordPress” and it simply wouldn’t work. Just FYI.
Thanks, Cynthia. I will look into this when I have a chance (which will be in a couple of hours).
I signed out of Word Press and tested the poll in a different browser and did not have this problem — the vote was tallied. Perhaps try a different browser? Or make sure that DN is whitelisted should you have any blocking plug-ins in your browser?
Hmm, I’m curious how useful this data will be without more context.
For instance, it’d also seem relevant how many peer-reviewed journal submissions you make in a year, e.g., to see if there’s a free-rider problem. Your teaching load would also seem to matter.
Also, there are many other types of submissions we might review that are not for journals, e.g., for conferences, reports, book manuscripts and proposals, grant proposals, external dissertation review, etc. Those seem to be just as important, if not more, than journal papers.
It’s something like a zero-sum game: if you spend time reviewing a book manuscript, for instance, then that’s probably one or more journal papers you won’t have time to review.
And so on. But good luck to the investigators, and I look forward to seeing the results.
I think ideally the data would tell us not just how much people in various categories review each year but also (for each person) how much they get asked to review.
For instance, I review every single thing I’ve been asked to review (except once when I had reviewed the paper for another journal already and the editors thus said they’d prefer for me not to review it for the second journal). But I think I get asked less than some other people get asked. If I got asked to review more, I’d review more. Eventually I might hit a limit and start to turn down review requests. Etc.
And my sense is that who gets asked depends not just (or even not at all) on their level of employment (tenured, tenure track, etc.) but on things like how many journal editors they are socially connected to, how much they publish, what areas they publish in, etc. And also who says yes probably depends on things like whether they attend a lot of conferences (and thus are not able to review stuff because they know who the author is) and so on.
Without that kind of information (and without that kind of information synced up with the information this poll is eliciting) I’m not sure it’ll be easy to conclude much of anything. If senior people are reviewing much more/much less/about the same as less senior people, we’ll have no way to know how much of the difference is driven by seniority as opposed to other factors.