On the life of a Referee

Refereeing is lonely work. When you have done your time-consuming job, you often never find out what the impact of your effort has been on the people principally involved (the author and editor); it is not uncommon that editors do not tell you of their decision. Sometimes you learn what happened to a refereed manuscript because you come across it in the course of your future research. (To be clear, refereeing is a significant part of my work: leaving aside conference-abstract-refereeing, I referee about twenty-five items a year--primarily journal articles, although, of course, book manuscripts and tenure and promotion dossiers are far more time-consuming.) This is why I always ask editors to thank diligent referees (including the ones that recommend reject) on my behalf.

Of course, in practice within 'active' research areas one often develops a decent sense who wrote a piece of research and what happened with it. I find it very disorienting to see work appear in print substantially unrevised that has what I take to be, say, serious argumentative flaws and/or scholarly lacunae. In such cases, I have to really resist the urge to write the editor, "What were you thinking?" I then also wonder, "has the other referee screwed up?" (Sometimes one learns the identity of the other referee!) One reason why I advocate the publication of referee reports with accepted/published work, is that it makes more transparent editorial decisions and guidance--not a trivial matter in context of discussions about citation-networks, patterns of exclusion, and plagiarism. (Recall the proposal here.) I would welcome having my referee reports being visible with my name attached to them, but I realize junior people do have legitimate fears about retaliation. I believe journals should experiment with this.

With the rise of editorial software, some journals now share others' referee-reports with referees in the context of a revise & resubmit. It has been fascinating to see how others react and craft their responses to the same work I have just judged. I even have had the amusing experience to see another referee (because of anonymity I have no idea who!) urge engagement with my work on the poor author; I was pretty sure that if I had been the author I would have assumed THAT referee was "that narcissistic Schliesser, again." Don't misunderstand me; it is rewarding to help folk improve their work and be part of a process that improves (one hopes) the quality of final product.  Sometimes I also have the more illegitimate satisfaction of feeling that I helped a young scholar gain important and merited scholarly success.

Recently, after completing a referee report on a revise & resubmit with editorial software, I received a note from an editor of a journal: "Prof X. was also one of the reviewers on MS xyyxyxy ("The Most Important Paper on Plato") for us here at PRESTIGIOUS JOURNAL, and he asked me to inform "Reviewer 3" (=you) of his opinion that you did an extraordinary job in reviewing this paper.  And please let me add my own thanks to his appreciation for your efforts." I admire the editor of PRESTIGIOUS JOURNAL It also turns out that Prof. X, whose identity I had not guessed, is one of my intellectual heroes, who I always associate with integrity and high standards. He is not known for effusive praise. This two-sentence note was very welcome; refereeing became a bit less lonely.