Hi Ecolog, In January, I conducted a poll to assess whether there is any evidence for a crisis in the review of ecology papers. The proxy used was the decline to review rate (weighted analysis of reported requests by reviews actually done). I know there are other possible estimates and that the sample size is not large, but the outcome of the survey is described in a paper in Immediate Science Ecology (http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/ISE), just scroll to the bottom of the main page and the pdf link is on the right.
The weighted mean decline to rate was 49%. I am not sure if we can interpret this as a crisis, i.e. those that are likely the most appropriate referees turn down doing reviews about the half time. Personally, I think so. I also analyzed the responses by productivity and role one serves in the process and reported those findings in the paper. If you are interested in gender effects, I summarized the findings on the Oikos Blog (http://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/). Men turn down reviews about 1.5 times more frequently than women in ecology. Again, this is just a exploratory dataset to examine peer review for ecologists by an ecologist. Please contact me or post to the blog if you to discuss implications further, but I did not want to extend this much further than an exploratory examination. cheers, chris.
