Thanks for the data Chris.As an editor, the stats reported by this poll fit my own experience that reviews are harder to procure each year and I know many other editors agree. As an author, I have an anecdote that fits the trend: A former student had a paper rejected recently (I am a coauthor) because the journal "could not find reviewers" for her paper. That's pretty frustrating because my ownpolicy is to review at least 5 times as many papers as I publish per year (on top of editorial duties). Reviewing duties are as important as publishing and we should consider ourselves hidden coauthors of all the manuscripts we review.I think journals should require authors to review at least 3 manuscripts per paper published in their journal (even if there is a long list of authors) before allowingthe authors to submit again.
******************************************************* Lee Dyer Biology Dept. 0314 UNR 1664 N Virginia St Reno, NV 89557 OR 585 Robin St Reno, NV 89509 Email: [email protected] Web: www.caterpillars.org phone: 504-220-9391 (cell) 775-784-1360 (office) > Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:33:00 -0400 > From: [email protected] > Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Is there a peer-review crisis in ecology? Summary of > analyses. > To: [email protected] > > 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.
