How Much Do Philosophers Referee?


Last week, we asked how many journal submissions philosophers in various positions referee each year.

The polls closed over the weekend. 844 people participated. What were the results?

The most popular answer among the respondents who are tenured or tenure-track philosophy professors is that they referee 5 to 8 submissions per year (followed by 1 to 4 submissions, and then 9 to 12). The most popular response from non-tenure-track academic philosophers and those with non-academic positions was 1 to 4 submissions. Among graduate students, the most popular response was 0.

The poll may suffer from defects that hinder its representativeness of the discipline. For example, though the poll was anonymous, those who don’t referee much might have been discouraged from responding, skewing the numbers high. On the other hand, though perhaps less common, there may be some refereeing overachievers out there who were too busy reviewing manuscripts to respond to the poll.

Below are the details. Discussion welcome.

Tenured philosophy professors (n=387):

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Tenured philosophy professors, how many journal submissions do you referee in a year?
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Untenured tenure-track philosophy professors (n=161):

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Untenured tenure-track philosophy professors, how many journal submissions do you referee in a year?
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Non-tenure track philosophy professors, lecturers, instructors, and adjuncts (n=182):

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Non-tenure-track philosophy professors, instructors, lecturers (who are not current graduate students), how many journal submissions do you referee in a year?
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Philosophy graduate students (n=93):

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Philosophy graduate students, how many journal submissions do you referee in a year?
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Those with graduate training in philosophy who work outside of academia (n=21):

This poll is no longer accepting votes

Those who have some graduate training in philosophy and a job outside of academia, how many journal submissions do you referee in a year?
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Neil Levy
Neil Levy
1 year ago

The AJP attempts to limit refereeing to one paper per referee per year (with a hard limit of two). That makes finding referees especially difficult for us: we try not to call on the super referees any more than on those who do far fewer a year.

Björn Lundgren
1 year ago

I’m surprised at how low these numbers are.

It would be interesting to ask reviewers how often they decline to review and then compare that with journal statistics. Of course, I’d preferably want to compare that data with how often they review. (It makes sense for someone who gets 30 review invitation per month to decline a large percentage, but it seems most people review less than 1 manuscript per month.)