I was talking with a friend just tonight about how scientific journals take months to get submissions reviewed, even though most reviewers do all of the reviews at the last minute, or pass it on to their grad students.
I think academia could be significantly less stressful if everyone actually finished reviews promptly. It’s very demoralizing (at least in my experience as a grad student) to pick up a paper that you thought was done months ago and have to fix it up again after it’s been rejected.
But unfortunately, there’s little benefit in that for the reviewers themselves. And academia seems particularly resistant to any attempts to change things.
Hmm. This doesn’t seem quite like the right sort of change. I don’t think reviewers procrastinate because they think everyone else procrastinate, and would change if everyone else would. I think they procrastinate for the same reasons most people do – general willpower failure or not caring.
A version of this that might work is (if there are deadlines, and they are waiting till the last minute to do the work), simply shortening the deadline.
Or if you can get a bunch of reviewers together in a room. The issue might be—if I do this fast/on time, what happens? It’s still on slow/late unless everyone else alsogets it done on fast/on time.
Nod. But that seems far less scalable, and meanwhile the reviewers don’t actually have much incentive to even want that. I assume the benefits accrue when you can expect that if you review things more promtply, this means later you can reasonable expect a paper you submit somewhere to get reviewed more promtply.
I was talking with a friend just tonight about how scientific journals take months to get submissions reviewed, even though most reviewers do all of the reviews at the last minute, or pass it on to their grad students.
I think academia could be significantly less stressful if everyone actually finished reviews promptly. It’s very demoralizing (at least in my experience as a grad student) to pick up a paper that you thought was done months ago and have to fix it up again after it’s been rejected.
But unfortunately, there’s little benefit in that for the reviewers themselves. And academia seems particularly resistant to any attempts to change things.
Hmm. This doesn’t seem quite like the right sort of change. I don’t think reviewers procrastinate because they think everyone else procrastinate, and would change if everyone else would. I think they procrastinate for the same reasons most people do – general willpower failure or not caring.
A version of this that might work is (if there are deadlines, and they are waiting till the last minute to do the work), simply shortening the deadline.
Or if you can get a bunch of reviewers together in a room. The issue might be—if I do this fast/on time, what happens? It’s still on slow/late unless everyone else also gets it done on fast/on time.
Nod. But that seems far less scalable, and meanwhile the reviewers don’t actually have much incentive to even want that. I assume the benefits accrue when you can expect that if you review things more promtply, this means later you can reasonable expect a paper you submit somewhere to get reviewed more promtply.