|
Philosophy instructor, recreational writer, humorless vegetarian.
|
This year Harvard Law School admitted only 19 new Black students:
This is a 65% drop from their average Black enrollment rate over the previous 55 years. The impact of the Supreme Court's ban on university affirmative action action last year has obviously been substantial.
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of 1851 contains a sobering entry:
ραφανιδοω: to thrust a radish up the fundament, a punishment of adulterers in Athens
In recalling this to friends at Christmas in 1972, historian John Julius Norwich wrote, “I’m sure it must once have been familiar to every schoolboy, and now that the classics are less popular than they used to be I should hate it to be forgotten.”
Editors of academic journals have been reporting that they find it increasingly hard to secure referees for papers that have been submitted to their journals. When I’ve been discussing this issue over the years with colleagues, I’ve heard a few remarks that made me wonder what our considerations are to decide whether or not to accept a review request. Clearly, there must be a content-wise fit: if one thinks the paper is outside one’s area of expertise, one should not accept the referee request. But then I have heard considerations such as “I decline because I have already refereed for this journal before”, or “I referee as many papers as I receive reports”, or “I referee 5 papers a year”. Are these valid reasons to decline?
Clearly, the answer cannot be that how much we choose to referee is purely a private affair. All academics would benefit if there would not be a shortage of referees, hence it cannot be a purely private affair. Yet the referee shortage takes the structure of a collective action problem. And we know that there are two principle ways to address collective action problems – either by having a collective decision maker (such as the government), which is not a solution available for this problem; or else by way of establishing a social norm.
Solving the referee crisis in academic peer review will require multiple measures, but when it comes to securing that enough people are willing to referee, I propose to discuss the number we should treat as the lower boundary of how much we should referee. Let’s call the number of reports a person writes for journals divided by the number of reports that person receives in response to their own paper submissions a person’s referee-ratio. I want to defend that the referee ratio should be at least 1.2. In other words, for every 4 reports we receive, we should write at least 5 (adjusted for the number of authors of a paper).
Why is that number not 1, as some seem to think? The first reason is that there are a number of reports being written by authors who will not be able to [fully] reciprocate. Think of PhD-students who submit their work, but are too junior to review themselves (they may become more sufficiently experienced towards the end of their PhD-trajectory, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption that some people submit to journals who do not have the skills and expertise (yet) to serve as referees). Some of them will submit for a few years and then stop doing academic research, and will at that point no longer be part of the system of peer-review.
The second reason is that there might be authors who temporarily should not be expected to reciprocate. I am thinking in particular of editors of journals, and associate editors with significant work loads, who are doing crucial work in making the system run in the first place. But if we agree on this, then it might well be the case that the minimal referee ratio should be 1.5 rather than 1.2 – I am not sure.
The third reason is that the system needs a bit of buffer in order to function. We need some oil to make the machine run smoothly. If everyone were to agree to adopt as a social norm that we should seek to have a referee ratio of minimally 1.2, then there would be more scholars who receive a referee request who would accept because the social norm tells them they should accept.
It is actually pretty easy to calculate our own referee ratio. Many people keep track of the papers they have refereed, often as part of their annual assessment conversations with their line managers. And it’s also quite easy to keep track of (or reconstruct for the past) the number of reports we have received. It might take us a few hours, but the potential objection that this is too burdensome isn’t very strong, I’d think.
My hope is that agreeing on a minimal referee ratio would help address the referee shortage problem. But it will also address the issue that some people are, qua character, much more prone to feel guilty if they decline a referee request. I am sadly in that camp (I generally blame it on having been raised in a Catholic culture). It has led to much agonizing, and contributed to an excessive work load, which has negatively affected my health. Once, when I was close to burn-out, I had a coach who told me to protect myself by quantifying upper limits to my professional commitments, because otherwise they would crush me. In short, people who are insufficiently able to say ‘no’ might be helped if they make the calculation and see their referee ratio is not around 1 but rather way over 2.
There are two alternatives that I can think of. One is to pay referees. But there are at least three reasons against this. First, it would increase the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in refereeing. Second, it is quite unfair against a background of huge inequalities in financial resources, especially on a global scale, but even within continents and countries. Third, it would commodify another aspect of academia – is this something we should want?
There are other strategies that journals can use that are complementary. Some journals now state that one can only submit if one is also willing to review for that journal; to me that seems absolutely reasonable. But if that were our only expression of reciprocity-duties, it would be too strict; for example, given my theoretical/conceptual expertise on the capability approach, I’ve reviewed papers that used that framework for a number of journals from other disciplines (such as Social Sciences and Medicine). So I think we should, to some extent, also be willing to review for journals that we will most likely never submit to, because it helps colleagues in other disciplines.
It might be that the number of 1.2 is not the right one. Perhaps it should be 1.5, or even 2. But the prior question is whether we agree there should be such a number that functions as a professional social norm. Or is there a better way to solve the referee crisis?
Hovertext:
Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors.
Hovertext:
Sometimes I look out the window and think of how many babies are now part of a personal brand.
Log in
