Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen complaints from journal editors about the difficulty of finding referees and managing the refereeing process in a timely way but also some commentary suggesting that there may not be a problem.

[Jasper Johns, Color Numeral Series]

Philosophy journal editors, can you help us out?

Since for various reasons you might be reluctant to share such information publicly, I’m not asking you to provide your stats in the comments here; instead, please email ([email protected]) them to me. If I get some useful information, I will share it with DN’s readers in a follow-up post; however, I won’t release any journal-specific data without the explicit permission of the editor who provides it.

What we’re looking for is the referee request acceptance rate. That is, what percentage of the potential referees you ask to referee a paper agree to do so? (For our purposes let’s, if we can, consider only new submissions, and not R&Rs.)

Additional questions, if you have the information and time to share it: (a) what percentage of referee requests go completely unanswered? (b) what percentage of referees who agree to referee a paper fail to do so before you decide to find an alternate referee? and (c) how many papers, of those that made it through the desk-rejection phase, have you ended up rejecting owing to an inability to find enough suitable referees for it?

If you can’t get to these latter questions, don’t let that deter you from answering the main one, please. Thank you!