Fox Charles W, Albert Arianne Y K, Vines Timothy H
1Department of Entomology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40546-0091 USA.
2Women's Health Research Institute, BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia V6H 3N1 Canada.
Res Integr Peer Rev. 2017 Mar 8;2:3. doi: 10.1186/s41073-017-0027-x. eCollection 2017.
It is commonly reported by editors that it has become harder to recruit reviewers for peer review and that this is because individuals are being asked to review too often and are experiencing reviewer fatigue. However, evidence supporting these arguments is largely anecdotal.
We examine responses of individuals to review invitations for six journals in ecology and evolution. The proportion of invitations that lead to a submitted review has been decreasing steadily over 13 years (2003-2015) for four of the six journals examined, with a cumulative effect that has been quite substantial (average decline from 56% of review invitations generating a review in 2003 to just 37% in 2015). The likelihood that an invitee agrees to review declines significantly with the number of invitations they receive in a year. However, the average number of invitations being sent to prospective reviewers and the proportion of individuals being invited more than once per year has not changed much over these 13 years, despite substantial increases in the total number of review invitations being sent by these journals-the reviewer base has expanded concomitant with this growth in review requests.
The proportion of review invitations that lead to a review being submitted has been declining steadily for four of the six journals examined here, but reviewer fatigue is not likely the primary explanation for this decline.
编辑们普遍反映，招募同行评审员变得越来越困难，原因是个人被要求评审的次数过于频繁，导致出现了评审疲劳。然而，支持这些观点的证据大多只是传闻。
我们研究了个人对六种生态与进化领域期刊评审邀请的回应。在所研究的六种期刊中，有四种期刊在13年（2003 - 2015年）间，导致提交评审意见的邀请比例一直在稳步下降，累积影响相当显著（从2003年56%的评审邀请能收到评审意见，平均下降到2015年的仅37%）。受邀者同意评审的可能性会随着他们一年中收到的邀请数量显著下降。然而，在这13年里，发送给潜在评审员的平均邀请数量以及每年被多次邀请的个人比例变化不大，尽管这些期刊发送的评审邀请总数大幅增加——评审员群体已随着评审请求的增加而相应扩大。
在此研究的六种期刊中，有四种期刊导致提交评审意见的邀请比例一直在稳步下降，但评审疲劳不太可能是这种下降的主要原因。
