Why do some academics review so many journal papers?

Finding time to review one or two journal submissions a week is a tricky task for busy academics, but not for so-called “hyper-prolific reviewers” who can knock out as many as seven reviews every day.

While hyper-prolific authors in academia have been much discussed, the curious cases of scholars already nearing 100 peer reviews for 2024 alone has recently come under scrutiny on social media.

Academics can have a foot in both camps, with one Middle East-based scientist publishing 180 papers in 2023 – an average of one every two working days – and reviewing 812 publications in the same year.

That incredible volume does not, however, come close to the levels achieved by hyper-prolific reviewers in previous years, said Graham Kendall, former provost of the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus.

In a 2022 paper, Professor Kendall identified the 10 most prolific reviewers on the Publons platform, of whom three had reviewed a paper a day on average over the course of the previous 16 years. Some had reviewed as many as seven papers a day on average in their most productive years.

While the incentives for prolific publication are understood, the reasons for reviewing so prodigiously are less obvious, since the task is typically unpaid, Professor Kendall told Times Higher Education.

“In my experience you get promoted on things like grant income, papers published or [indicators of] international esteem such as giving keynotes, but I have never come across a promotional or employment panel that looks at how many papers you have reviewed,” he said, describing the phenomenon as “a little strange”.

“I know people put that sort of information on their CVs – perhaps ‘I have reviewed n papers for x journal’ – but I have never done that. I’ve never even kept a record.”

Professor Kendall said that he still “struggled to find a good reason as to why you would want to review so many papers”.

Other studies have suggested that some prolific reviewing might not correlate with publication success. A 2018 study by Edinburgh Napier University academics found that 49 of the top 100 reviewers on Publons were low-cited researchers, of whom seven had zero citations or outputs.

One identified reviewer was reviewing three papers a day and producing 2,400 words per review – an output that would equate to about 12 hours’ solid typing per day for a proficient typist.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com