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Review invitations

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The review process begins with an editor contacting reviewers to ask them to assess the manuscript. The invitation will generally include some information about the manuscript (usually the title and abstract) as well as the journal’s basic expectations for the review (timeframes, formats etc.). You’ll use that information to decide whether to accept or decline the invitation.

We’ll get into responding to invitations below. But let’s start off by talking about how to get the invitation in the first place.

Jump straight to:

How do editors find reviewers?

Every editor will have a slightly different way of deciding who to invite to review a manuscript. There are three main pools that most editors will draw from though. In no particular order, these are:

  • Cited authors: a great way for editors to find people qualified to assess a manuscript is to look at who the authors have cited. If someone has written articles or books that the authors felt were important enough to their work to cite, they’ve probably got the expertise in the field to be able to comment on the paper.
  • Preferred reviewers: not all journals ask authors to provide a list of preferred reviewers for their manuscript and not all editors choose to consider those lists. For those that do though, these lists are very helpful. Authors will generally have a good idea of the other key figures in their field and can say who would be able to provide well-balanced comments grounded in expertise. These lists can often help to spark ideas about other potential reviewers as well (for example, editors may choose to look at people who’ve worked or published with the recommended reviewers recently).
  • The editor’s network: this could be people who they know well and have worked with in the past, previous authors who have submitted to the journal, someone they saw present at a conference, etc. This is a very loose definition of the term ‘network’ – it essentially includes anyone in the field who’s on the radar of the editor in question. This is where you can really help to boost your chances of becoming a reviewer.

Getting into an editor’s network

It’s all well and good to say that to become a reviewer, you need to get onto an editor’s radar. But how do you actually do that. Here are a few tips and ideas:

  • Your supervisor: tell your supervisor (or any senior colleagues) that you’re interested in reviewing. More senior, high-profile academics tend to get more review invitations than they’re able to accept. If they know that you’re interested in reviewing, they can respond to editors and say ‘I can’t review this paper, but here’s someone who can’. This is the best way to start getting review invitations
  • Presentations: if you’re presenting at a conference, use the opportunity to let people know that you’d like to review. Tack a final slide onto the end of your presentation with a list of areas that you feel confident reviewing in. This will not only highlight your areas of expertise to editors, it will also let authors know that they could include you as a recommended reviewer.
  • Networking: networking at conferences, workshops etc. is always a good idea. If you’re talking to an editor, you don’t need to specifically mention that you’d like to review for their journal, but as long as it’s a natural part of the conversation, it’s fine to do. The key thing is to let them know what you’re studying and what your areas of expertise are. In general, we would not recommend approaching or emailing editors specifically to ask them to invite you to review.
  • Post-acceptance/-publication: if/when you have a manuscript accepted for publication in a journal, you will generally receive a message from the editor or from a member of the editorial team. Some authors choose to respond to these emails to say thank you for accepting the paper, ask questions about the next steps or provide feedback on the review process. It can also be a good time to offer to review for the journal in the future.

Responding to review invitations

Once you start receiving invitations to review, you’ll need to respond to them. In most cases, this is a fairly straightforward process. Regardless of whether you’re saying yes or no though, the most important thing to remember when responding to review invitations is:

Respond as quickly as possible

For editors and authors, a quick response to a review invitation is the best response. Even if you aren’t able to provide a review, saying no within a day or two allows the editor to move on to the next person on their list and minimize any delays to the process.

There are a few other things that you may want to consider when responding to a review:

  • Don’t be afraid to say no: it’s perfectly normal for people to decline invitations to review a paper. If you haven’t reviewed before, it can feel like saying ‘no’ will mean that you won’t get invited again – that isn’t the case. A quick decline is better for the editor (and the authors) than a delayed review or a short, vague review.
  • Let the editors know if you’re unsure of anything: sometimes you may receive a review invitation for a manuscript that seems to be on the fringes of your areas of expertise. This is most likely to happen if you’re reviewing for an interdisciplinary journal. If you look at an abstract for an article and feel that you would only be able to review one aspect of it, let the editor know. It may be that they only intended to have you comment on that aspect and have sought another reviewer to comment on the other elements. If that isn’t something that they’ve considered, then letting them know early on gives them the opportunity to pick out a reviewer who can focus on the areas that you’re unsure of. Either way, it’s much better for the editors to have an idea of what you will be commenting on up front than to receive a partial review of the paper. This also saves you the potential stress of trying to make comments on research outside of your areas of expertise.
  • Ask for extensions if you need them: editors won’t always be able to offer extensions to review deadlines (perhaps there have been previous delays in the review of this paper, for example), but when they can, they will. A thorough review is always going to be more useful to everyone involved in the process than a rushed one. And if there are going to be some delays to the process, it’s better if the editors are aware of and can plan for them. So, if you know you won’t be able to start working on your review until after your viva in two weeks, ask for a two week extension.

Where to now?

Review invitations | Edinburgh University Press