Let’s talk about reviewer invitations. If you have spent any time working with scholarly journals and peer review lately, the following may sound very familiar to you. An email arrives from a journal you barely recognize. The greeting feels generic. The manuscript is only loosely connected to your area of expertise. And somewhere in the invitation, you are told that your “distinguished expertise” makes you the perfect person to review this particular manuscript.
Except it doesn’t.
You probably weren’t selected because an editor knew your work and thought, This is exactly the person we need for this paper. More likely, your name appeared in a search result or reviewer recommendation tool along with dozens of others.
Then the invitations went out.
And that, to me, is where we need to start paying attention. During Peer Review Week, we talk a great deal about reviewer capacity, turnaround times, submission volume, automation, and burnout. All of those things matter. But I think we are overlooking something even more basic.
Peer review works because people agree to participate in it. And people are much more willing to participate when they feel that they are part of a professional community rather than just another name in a database.
What Happened to the Water Cooler Conversation?
I suspect that your most valuable connections in scholarly publishing did not occur inside a manuscript submission system. They happened at society meetings. In conference hallways. Over coffee. During an editorial board meeting. Or after a presentation, when someone said, “You should really talk to Dr. Smith about this—she’s doing interesting work in that area.”
Editors knew their communities. They knew who was doing strong methodological work, who was beginning to establish expertise in a particular niche, who might bring a different perspective to a manuscript, and who could provide a thoughtful review.
That knowledge mattered.
Today, many of those connections are harder to maintain. Travel budgets are tighter. Conferences have changed. Editorial boards can become names on a masthead rather than active participants in the journal. Editors are managing larger workloads and often have less time to cultivate their reviewer communities.
Technology stepped into that gap. And technology can certainly help. I am not arguing that we should abandon reviewer databases, search tools, or automation. Anyone who manages peer review knows how valuable those tools can be.
The problem comes when the tools replace editorial judgment instead of supporting it. When the process becomes: search, select twenty names, send twenty invitations, and hope two people respond, we have stopped treating reviewer selection as an intellectual decision. It becomes a numbers exercise.
The Reviewer Dragnet
I understand why it happens. Submission volumes have grown, editors are under pressure to move papers through the system, and finding reviewers can be one of the most frustrating parts of journal management.
An editor may spend a substantial amount of time looking for reviewers only to receive decline after decline—or no response at all. So, sending more invitations seems logical. But think about what happens on the other end.
Researchers receive invitation after invitation, many of them poorly matched to their expertise. Eventually, journal emails start looking like background noise. They stop opening them. Or they create an inbox rule. Or they decline without giving the manuscript much consideration because they assume the same invitation has already gone to twenty other people.
We then say we have a “reviewer shortage” and respond by sending even more invitations. That is not solving the problem. It may actually be contributing to it.
We Need to Put Some Humanity Back Into the Process
There is no single solution to reviewer capacity. But I do think journals can make some practical changes.
Use Editorial Boards and Associate Editors as Actual Working Networks
Editorial board members and Associate Editors should be part of reviewer development, not simply names listed on the journal website.
The Editor-in-Chief needs to cultivate a sense of community among the editorial board and associate editors by asking them who is emerging in their fields. Encouraging them to recommend early-career researchers who are ready to review. Have experienced reviewers and senior editors mentor new reviewers. Bring reviewer recruitment into editorial board discussions.
That is how you grow a community rather than simply expanding a database.
Send Fewer, Better Invitations
I would rather see an editor send a thoughtful invitation to three well-matched reviewers than send the same generic message to twenty people (sometimes 100 people). Even one sentence explaining why someone was selected can make a difference: Your recent work on this methodology made us think your perspective would be particularly valuable.
Now the reviewer understands why the journal is approaching them. That feels very different from being one of twenty names returned by a keyword search.
Use Conferences to Recruit Reviewers Again
Society meetings and professional conferences should be among our best opportunities for reviewer development. Editors are already surrounded by researchers who care enough about the discipline to attend the meeting. Talk to them. Pay attention to early-career sessions. Introduce editorial board members to potential reviewers. Hold reviewer workshops. Explain how reviewing works and why it matters.
A researcher who develops a relationship with a journal is far more likely to respond to an invitation than someone whose first interaction with the publication is a cold, automated email.
Technology Should Support the Relationship, Not Replace It
I am not anti-automation. Good workflow systems make journals more efficient. Reviewer recommendation tools can uncover researchers whom an editor might otherwise miss. Automated reminders save editorial offices an enormous amount of administrative time.
We need those tools. But there is a difference between using technology to support editorial work and allowing technology to become the editorial work. Reviewer selection still requires judgment. It requires understanding the manuscript. It requires knowing something about the field. And, whenever possible, it requires knowing something about the people you are asking to give several hours of their time to your journal.
Peer review ultimately runs on goodwill. Researchers review because they believe that contributing their expertise benefits the larger scholarly community. Once we lose that sense of community, another automated reminder is not going to bring it back.
A Final Thought
Maybe I am a little old-school about this. But after years of working with journals and watching peer review from the operational side, I still believe that relationships matter. No software update is going to replace an editor who knows the field, recognizes the people doing interesting work, and understands why a particular researcher would be right for a particular manuscript.
If we want a more sustainable peer review system, we probably do not need to send more invitations. We need to make the invitations we send mean something. That means reconnecting with our editorial boards, getting back into the rooms where our scholarly communities gather, developing new reviewers, and remembering that there is a person on the other side of every automated email.
A manuscript may move through an automated workflow, but peer review should still feel like a conversation.
