As new academic journals have emerged in political science and existing journals experience increasing submission rates, editors are concerned that scholars experience "reviewer fatigue." Editors often assume that an overload of requests to review makes scholars less willing to perform the anonymous yet time-consuming tasks associated with reviewing manuscripts. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of the reasons why scholars decline to review. We empirically investigated the rate at which scholars accept or decline to review, as well as the reasons they gave for declining. We found that reviewer fatigue is only one of several reasons why scholars decline to review. The evidence suggests that scholars are willing to review but that they also lead busy professional and personal lives.
Is the peer-review process at academic journals gendered? The answer to this question has important implications for the advancement of women in the political science profession. However, few studies have had access to data that can evaluate whether the peer-review process is gendered. We investigate this for papers submitted to the American Political Science Review across two editorial teams to identify trends over time. We evaluate overall differences across gender, but we also present more fine-grained data to evaluate gender differences across subfield, methodology, and submitting author’s institutional affiliation and academic rank. Furthermore, we show that prior service as a reviewer is associated with a higher acceptance rate for first-time submitters. We demonstrate that the review process is not gendered. Women’s share of submissions and acceptances has risen but remains lower than their presence in the discipline.
How international in scope is publishing in political science? Previous studies have shown that the top journals primarily publish work by scholars from the United States and, to a lesser extent, other global-north countries. However, these studies used published content and could not evaluate the impact of the review process on the relative absence of international scholars in journals. This article evaluates patterns of submission and publication by US and international scholars for the American Political Science Review—one of the most selective peer-reviewed journals in the discipline. We found that scholars from the United States and other global-north countries are published approximately in proportion to submissions but that global-south scholars fare less well. We also found that scholars affiliated with prestigious universities are overrepresented, irrespective of geographic location. The article concludes with observations about the implications of these findings for efforts to internationalize the discipline.
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