In the third instalment of Publish or Perish, I admitted to a certain expertise in collecting rejection emails. There is, however, a prerequisite for adding to the collection: someone has to make a decision. Until then, the manuscript sits somewhere between scholarly contribution and administrative limbo, while its author tries to explain how “under review” is going to become a publication before their next annual review or contract renewal. The university has a deadline. The journal has a dropdown menu. Good luck reconciling the two.
Which raises a question that is remarkably easy to avoid when the paper in question is mine: who exactly is supposed to be reviewing all this research? Some mythical colleague with no teaching, no marking, no students and no research expectations of their own? I would like to meet that person. More importantly, I would like their workload allocation. We want careful readers who understand the work, recognise its contribution and return their comments promptly. Preferably without suggesting that the central argument requires a complete rethink. I can see the attraction.
Yet reviewing somebody else’s work can be remarkably difficult to justify when the conversation about our own progress keeps returning to what we have published. Another published paper looks like achievement, while an afternoon spent helping improve someone else’s paper looks like an afternoon not spent writing our own. For an early-career researcher trying to keep a job, that distinction matters. What, exactly, are we teaching people to prioritise here?
There is certainly no shortage of material requiring attention. The US National Science Foundation’s 2026 figures show publication output growing from roughly 2.19 million in 2014 to 3.53 million in 2024, an increase of about 61%. Those figures only cover selected science and engineering journals and conference proceedings indexed in Scopus, rather than everything ever published. In the Publish or Perish Paradox, I cited a figure that put 2022 publications at 5.14 million in over 47,000 journals.
That 3.53 million figure excludes manuscripts reviewed and rejected, and tells us nothing about the additional rounds of review behind the papers that eventually appear. I’m not convinced this growing mountain of research is something to celebrate. I suspect a fair proportion adds little beyond another line on someone’s CV; however, separating worthwhile contributions from the heap still requires someone to read them. Even work that we’d likely be better off without demands a great deal of someone else’s time. Universities cannot keep treating publications as institutional achievements and the reviewing that enables them as favours performed by somebody else’s staff.
Of course, journals publish turnaround figures. We can consult those before submitting, assuming we know what we are looking at. In October 2026, Teaching Education lists 34 days to first decision and 185 days to the first decision following peer review. Both are medians based on the preceding six months. The first includes desk rejections; the second concerns manuscripts actually sent for review. Quite a difference if you have built your publication target around the shorter wait. The distinction is explained on the journal’s website, but the attractive first number cannot tell us how long a substantive assessment will take. Nor does the eventual decision have to be the one we wanted. Is there anything worse than waiting over a year for a rejection? Speaking from personal experience, not much!
A study of The Journal of Higher Education, covering submissions from 2017 to early 2022, found that accepted papers took an average of 13 months to reach online publication. A year is a considerable amount of time, especially for an increasingly casualised workforce waiting for their next contract. And that’s a successful outcome. A rejection can mean starting again elsewhere. I have already devoted a post to that particular pleasure, so I will spare you the encore. The point is that careers depend on timelines they can’t control.
Now comes the uncomfortable part. Those of us who publish cannot reasonably expect unlimited attention to our own work while regarding everybody else’s manuscript as an unfortunate interruption. If I want knowledgeable colleagues to take my arguments seriously, there is a reasonable expectation that I will return the favour. Reviewing is part of what makes this work academic in the first place. Our fields develop through a continuing conversation: we put forward arguments, scrutinise evidence and challenge one another’s conclusions. If we expect others to engage seriously with our writing but see no responsibility to engage with theirs, are we participating in that conversation, or simply adding publications to our CVs? The capacity to contribute will differ, but the responsibility cannot belong only to somebody else.
For an early-career academic, reviewing should be understood as part of entering the scholarly conversation, rather than an optional extra to consider once their publication list is long enough. Reading someone else’s work critically requires us to examine the relationship between their claims, evidence and conclusions, then explain what holds up and what needs work. These are precisely the habits we need in our own writing. We cannot spend our careers asking to be heard without expecting to listen.
That expectation should also shape how we introduce people to academic work. Supervisors and senior colleagues can help newer researchers find appropriate reviewing opportunities, work through a review with them and ensure their contribution is acknowledged. Universities, meanwhile, need to recognise that time as academic work. If every conversation about progress comes back to publications, we should hardly be surprised when reviewing someone else’s paper feels like time stolen from producing our own. We teach people what counts, then complain when they act accordingly.
An early-career academic teaching across several contracts doesn’t get a free afternoon because a publisher’s invitation describes reviewing as an honour. Nor do we cease to have teaching, marking, and meeting our own research deadlines simply because someone needs a paper reviewed. Declining a review can be entirely reasonable. Accepting one and taking months to deliver it is harder to defend. The expectation should be to contribute competently when we can, with greater responsibility falling on those who have more security and control over their work. We do not need another universal quota that ignores how differently academic jobs are arranged.
Universities have a choice here. They can recognise reviewing and editorial work in workload allocations and promotion, and make room for it by reducing something else. Or they can continue encouraging more publications while hoping that professional goodwill will supply the necessary labour. Adding “review more” to an already full job description does not solve the problem. It gives the same person another way to fall short. Publishers and journals also need to support their editors, recruit beyond the usual names and tell authors what is happening when things stall. An automated reminder is useful; it cannot create a qualified reviewer with time to spare.
In the earlier posts, I questioned what we reward and whether all this publishing amounts to meaningful contribution. Reviewing brings that question rather close to home. I am hardly outside the system I’m criticising. I still submit papers, want them accepted and get frustrated waiting for a decision. The early-career researcher whose manuscript is waiting for someone like me wants exactly the same consideration. We owe each other some effort, and institutions owe us an honest account of where that effort fits. Otherwise, we can keep congratulating ourselves on our most recent publication while wondering why nobody has time to read the paper currently holding up someone’s career. Surely even academia can see the problem with that.
