On Peer Review from the Scholarly Kitchen

This is an excellent data-driven analysis of peer review, which calls into question the conventional wisdom that increasing demands on key scholars for reviews has broken the peer review system. By looking at actual aggregate data, Tim Vines shows that “…while it’s natural to join the dots between rising submissions and your own workload, and from there to the imminent demise of peer review, the connections may not really exist.” In fact, it appears that while senior scholars may be being bombarded by review requests, the increase is due to their own increased prominence, not to any systemic factors.