Top Political Scientists Are Doing Less Peer Review Since the Pandemic

📍 Context: Reviewing Looks Strained

By many accounts, the state of peer reviewing is under strain: editors report difficulty getting scholars to respond to review requests, let alone accept and complete reviews on time. Earlier, pre-pandemic work (Djupe 2015; Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey 2022) found that reviewing was heavily concentrated in a core set of reviewers, that reviewing rose with age and rank, and that political scientists broadly affirmed the value of peer review for themselves and the discipline.

📋 What Was Compared: A New Summer 2024 Survey Against 2013 Patterns

• Summer 2024 survey of 637 political scientists
• Comparison point: 2013 data and patterns previously documented in 2015 and 2022 studies

🔎 Key Findings: Decline Among High-Volume Reviewers

• There is an evident decline in reviewing activity since the pandemic, concentrated among those who historically reviewed the most.
• This decline contrasts with the earlier pattern where reviewing was concentrated among older, higher-ranked scholars and was seen as widely valuable.

💡 Interpretation: Links to Broader Changes in the Discipline

• The observed shift likely reflects larger movements within political science and higher education, especially efforts toward diversification of labor and participation.
• The decline among traditional high-volume reviewers may signal a redistribution of reviewing burdens rather than a uniform drop across all groups.

⚖️ Why It Matters: Implications for Journals and the Profession

• Changes in who reviews and how much they review affect editorial practices, peer-review workloads, and the sustainability of current reviewing norms.
• Understanding these shifts is crucial for designing fairer, more resilient review systems as the discipline continues to diversify.