Please don’t pass a review invitation onto your student or colleague

June 23, 2019 Filed under Blog, Featured, Reviewing, Reviews

From time to time, I get reviewers who need to decline a review invitation, but instead tell me that they’ve passed on their review invitation to a student or colleague. The invitee may think that they are helping out the editor (in some cases, they are), but there are good reasons why they should not do this.

First, invitations from journals to review manuscripts are supposed to be confidential. You don’t want to be breaking that trust that the journal has in you. That invitation was for you, and you alone. Importantly, authors expect their submissions to be confidential. Some authors may advertise their submissions on their web sites or tweets, but that is their choice to publicly announce their submission. It is not the prerogative of the reviewer to do so.

Second, when editors make reviewer invitations, they are often trying to balance a number of factors in their invitations. Editors usually try to ensure that they have a proper balance between

experienced scientists and early career scientists,

different disciplines that are relevant to the manuscript (i.e., the journal might need a statistician, a synoptic meteorologist, and a numerical modeller to address all the aspects of this submitted manuscript), and

different research groups, viewpoints about the science, and different analysis approaches.

An invitee who passes their invitation onto someone else may disrupt the balances that editors are trying to maintain. Although we do encourage students and early career scientists to perform reviews, editors do need to ensure that the peer-review process maintains the standards of the journal. Personally, having one such reviewer as part of my reviewer team can be a great learning experience for the student, but having too many inexperienced reviewers on a manuscript can cause difficulties in the peer-review process.

Third, there may be reasons why the third party you invited is unsuitable to be given the manuscript. For example, the editor may not want the third party to serve as a reviewer because of past experiences as a reviewer (e.g., the third party may be consistently late in returning reviews, the third party may be on a list of scientists that the author does not want reviewing).

Where invited reviewers who cannot perform reviews can be helpful is to let the Editor know that there are others who they may wish to consider. Such recommendations can be very helpful to us editors. Furthermore, if you want to educate your student on how to write a review, that’s great. Just ask the editor first to ensure that we know that the manuscript will be shared with another person. Just don’t cross the line and start inviting others without the editor knowing. Inviting reviewers is the job of the editor.