In our August “how can we help you?” thread, Big Ben writes:

I am an early career researcher, and soon after completing my PhD, I received invites from two journals to review submissions. However, in the past one year, I have received no such invites. (although I do not have a stellar publication record, I do have a couple of articles in reasonably recognized journals.)

I would like to review more papers, but I do not know how to get invited to review one. Can someone share some tips?

More generally, I would like to know more about the method journal editors adopt in choosing reviewers (does the submission system suggest reviewers automatically based on the interests/published papers, do editors look at the bibliography of a submission and choose names, is there a cross-journal system to rate reviewers, is there a repository where one can volunteer to review, etc.)

These are both excellent queries. One reader with editing experience submitted the following reply:

One tip is to let senior people/junior people with name recognition/who work at research departments in your subfields know that you are interested in refereeing more and rarely get requests. I am an associate editor and almost all refereeing requests these days come from alternate suggestions from those who declined. And when I am making those suggestions when I decline things, I often am in a rush and just think of whoever pops into my mind most quickly and write down those names. If you make yourself salient to the people who are often turning things down, you will very likely start getting more requests. (And you shouldn’t feel like you can only do this if you know the person likes your work, or anything like that–I think the bar is pretty low for what people think of as competency to review, so I think anyone you know who you feel comfortable randomly emailing would be fine!)

Another reader, an associate editor, submitted the following as well:

[A]s an associate editor (at a mid-level specialty journal), I use the following procedure: (1) if I know the area of the paper, I think of people I know of who might have something interesting to say about it. I don’t spend a lot of time here, so inevitably I tend to favor people whose work I know well, either because I know them personally or because of their reputation (2) if I don’t, and sometimes when I do, I use the references (3) when people selected via 1 and 2 decline, I hope to get recommendations from them for alternatives (4) if none of 1-3 work (unusual) I search the literature on my own I don’t think there’s much that could be done to hack this system. You’ll naturally get more, and probably eventually too many, such invitations, as your networks, reputations, and citations counts grow. You could volunteer, and I guess I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but it’s never happened to me and so there’s always a chance that someone would think it weird. If you’re mainly interested in seeing early, new, work in your field, you might also contact the APA program committees; I believe (not sure) they take volunteer referees, and these papers are often more on the cutting edge than journal submissions.

Do any other readers have any other tips or insights?

Originally appeared on The Philosophers’ Cocoon Read More