Today, for the first time since I became Editor of the Journal of Economic Psychology, I rejected a paper due to lack of reviewers.
This was a very sad thing to do. I saw promise in the paper (which was actually a Brief Report) and thought it would be interesting, but of course that is not how peer reviewing works. Without the support and review of peers, a paper cannot be evaluated. If a large number of natural reviewer candidates decline, at some point I cannot keep the authors waiting, and I have to take the hint that there is insufficient interest on the paper.
Sadly, this will most likely happen more and more in the future. And it might happen to any of us. “The reviewing process is currently facing a major challenge due to a lack of reviewers.” These are not my words–they come from a 2018 article published in the journal “European Science Editing,” which is the official journal of the European Association of Science Editors. Yes, there are more and more articles submitted every year, and there are less and less people willing to act as reviewers, and people who do write reviews are less and less willing to write one review more.
It really does not work like that. Without reviews, the process of scientific publishing will grind to a halt. This is a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma game (or a public good game): if we do not cooperate (by being Editors, serving in Editorial boards, and writing polite, well-thought reviews), journals cannot function. If journals cease to function properly, papers will take forever to be published, important contributions will be lost, and science will become an extraordinarily slow affair (something which is already happening in Economics). We cannot afford that.
We need to start assuming that declining to write a review is not a neutral statement anymore. Rather, it is a negative statement which says that the paper is not worth your time. This is a very regrettable fact, but a fact nonetheless, and we need to keep it in mind. As an editor, I have decided that in the future I will inform the colleagues who decline to write a review whenever that forces me to turn down the paper. This is not to reproach them anything. Far from it! We all have to decline reviewing from time to time, there is no question about that. But I think a certain awareness of the consequences of our decisions is necessary. Also, when a paper is rejected or accepted on the basis of reviews, it is customary to inform reviewers. On the same vein, we should inform people when a paper is rejected due to their decision to decline to review (and that of other potential reviewers).
This is compounded right now by a large number of potential reviewers citing COVID-19 and the burdens of working at home (sic) as reasons for declining to review. I am unsure exactly which aspect of working at home (and hence saving commuting times) is killing the time that a scientist would otherwise have devoted to refereeing. It used to be the case that taking a home-office day was viewed as a strategy to improve efficiency and have more time for research, writing reviews, etc (actually, I have the impression that the number of submissions has gone up since home confinements started). It is of course a different environment, and there are of course special cases and extreme situations–nobody is denying that. But our obligations (written and unwritten) as scientists are the same as they were before the onset of home confinements, and it is up to each of us to organize. While I of course accept and respect such answers, I would be lying if I said that I have a full understanding for all of them (as I said, there are some extreme cases). I do not think authors would show much understanding if we at JoEP wrote back to them stating that, due to the burdens of home office, we are going to cut down on the number of papers we are willing to handle. It really, really, cannot work like that.
There also seem to be sub-field differences, even before quarantine times. In the last year, I have sadly come to realize that there is a particular subfield (which will remain nameless here) which we used to cover at JoEP where authors (including those who have published in our journal, even recently) are particularly happy to decline to review for us. I am speaking of two dozens of invitations before you get two reviewers to agree, only for one of them never to respond again and the other to provide a one-paragraph, uninformative review. Again, it cannot work like that. So, in practice, and unhappily, we are reducing our coverage of that particular subfield, as we need to think twice before actually handling one paper hailing from that specialty, only to spend an inordinate amount of time hunting down reviewers. I wish this were not the case, but I do not see a choice here.
This is all far less than ideal. Of course we all need to protect our time and we have to draw the line somewhere. But we cannot draw it too close to our feet. Sometimes, younger researchers ask me for standards and guidance as to “what is normal.” I have no data on that (and if somebody has it: send me the paper!), but speaking out of my personal experience as reviewer, associate editor, and editor in chief, I can say that writing two dozen reviews per year is well within normal for an active scientist in economics or psychology, and, I am very sorry, but “I am writing two other reviews right now” (sic) is not a particularly good excuse.
All I can hope for is that more and more scientists will remember some basic Kantian principles and put themselves in the shoes of the authors when they receive the next invitation to review. And that readers of this will forgive me if a bit of my exasperation at not always being able to give authors the service they deserve is showing in this post.
Carlos' Ramblings 