Peer review

Theory & Psychology, like any other peer-reviewed journal, relies on the support and goodwill of the community it represents. A vital component of this is the service provided by all of those individuals who contribute thoughtful reviews of manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. In the final issue of Theory & Psychology every year, we publish an acknowledgement of peer reviewers who have conducted reviews for the journal in the previous year. We published this acknowledgement in the last issue of 2018 as usual. However, I would now like to break with tradition by starting 2019 with a more general note of gratitude to everyone who has dedicated their time and expertise to the task of evaluating manuscripts that have been submitted to the journal. The journal could not function without your dedication.

Peer review is not perfect. It could never be perfect. But it does play an important role in scholarly systems of knowledge development and dissemination. It provides a test of ideas, an arena for checking and justifying knowledge claims, and a mechanism to apply epistemological and ethical criteria to the articulation of knowledge that we then label scholarly. Can peer review be abused? Of course. Left unchecked, it can be used to help entrench orthodoxies and stifle creativity. Does peer review contain and lead to errors? Absolutely. Nevertheless, peer review is a vital and critically important part of the development of scholarly knowledge. Together with a commitment to healthy debate shared among scholarly communities, editorial boards, and publishers, peer review offers a foundation of scrutiny and added depth of thought that holds great value.

The production of scholarly knowledge not only in theoretical psychology, but across all of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, involves us being both producers and critics of knowledge claims. Peer review exemplifies this dual role. When we submit a manuscript to journals for publication at least two or three, but usually more, individuals take the time to carefully read the work and communicate their assessment. A colleague in the natural sciences did the arithmetic for me: “If I submit 5 articles to journals in a year, 15 reviews have to be written just to process my articles. I therefore try to do at least 15 reviews per year just to match the effort colleagues put into reviewing my work.”

When I invite individuals to review manuscripts that have been submitted to Theory & Psychology, responses vary and, admittedly, it is more difficult to find reviewers for some manuscripts than others. In some rare instances, the first three individuals who are invited to review the manuscript all accept the invitation. In some cases, I have invited 15 or even 20 individuals to review before securing two who agree to review the manuscript. In part, this may be owing to the topic of the manuscript. In some instances, I have made a mistake by sending the manuscript out for review, when instead it should have been desk rejected because it is out of the scope of the journal or of insufficient quality. And sometimes it is a busy time of year and many individuals who would otherwise gladly conduct a review simply cannot fit in another task.

However, among the many declines to review a manuscript, two recent responses stick in my mind. The first related to a manuscript on a topic that was within the scope of the journal, but one with which I had little familiarity and therefore had little knowledge about suitable reviewers. I spent some time reading up on key figures in the field and looking for potential reviewers. I invited one of these scholars to review the manuscript. Their response came quickly: they explained that they are too senior to review journal manuscripts and were therefore declining the request. They also did not suggest other reviewers I might contact instead.

I received another interesting response to an invitation to review a different manuscript from a well-published and working faculty member in a psychology department. The person responded that they no longer review journal articles. I followed up by asking if they might recommend others in their field who might be suitable reviewers for the manuscript, but I received no further reply. These responses made me wonder about a number of things. Perhaps, when one becomes a very senior scholar, one is no longer a “peer” and so should no longer conduct peer reviews?

I am heartened that this is an attitude that does not seem to be prevalent among theoretical psychologists. I am deeply grateful to the many senior and widely respected scholars in our community who regularly agree to review manuscripts and provide authors with detailed and constructive feedback on their work. I often receive messages from authors, even those whose manuscripts have been rejected, thanking the reviewers for the valuable input they provided. In particular, junior authors or scholars who are moving into a new field submit manuscripts with some trepidation and an expectation not so much that their article will be accepted, but that they will receive valuable feedback through the peer review process.

Peer review is in many ways a thankless task. Although there may be some benefits such as being exposed to new research before it is widely available, being made aware of scholarship we might not otherwise come into contact with, or honing our own skills through evaluating others’ research, there is relatively little recognition of the valuable work done by peer reviewers. With the growth of open access publishing and associated costs to the researcher, some of my colleagues have questioned why they should conduct peer review for free for journals that also charge them for publishing manuscripts. These are certainly legitimate questions. However, I see the issue of open access publishing as somewhat separate from that of peer review. Scholarly journals require financing. The two dominant models involve either subscription models, in which libraries and institutions pay to access the journal, or open access models (therefore, no revenue from subscriptions), with costs to the researchers who submit articles to the journal. There are merits and disadvantages to both models that are important to consider, but these issues do not bear on the considerations relating to a reciprocal obligation of publishing scholars to also conduct peer reviews. In particular, whether journals are financially supported through institutional subscriptions or through grants held by researchers or other means, articles submitted will need to be peer reviewed. All of us who submit articles to scholarly journals are peers in this system, regardless of whether we submit to open access or subscription-based journals. All of us, regardless of seniority, thus draw on the labour of at least two or three (often more) peers for every single article we submit to a journal for possible publication. It seems to me that this calculation does not change across the developmental career stages of an academic, unless we simply become less productive as we become more senior.