Research
Peer reviews for journals and solicitations
Accept few, review well, decline fast: sort review invitations, spot predatory publishers, meet your deadlines.
The problem
Invitations to review, to join an editorial board or to publish “free of charge” arrive every week. Some are legitimate and useful for your career; many are predatory. The reviews you do accept end up at the “final reminder” stage.
Step-by-step method
- Spot the invitations in your email triage (“watch out” column): journal, publisher, deadline, topic.
- Vet the publisher: indexed journal, known publisher, hidden fees, promise of fast publication. Claude flags the warning signs; you make the call.
- Set a rule: a number of reviews per month, within your field, for journals you actually read.
- Decline in bulk whatever fails the rule, with a short message ready to copy.
- For accepted reviews: the deadline goes into the look-ahead table; Claude helps structure the report (summary, major points, minor points) from your notes. Every finding is proven by a word-for-word excerpt from the manuscript and carries a label: verified, expert judgement or to be confirmed.
- Reread what you said before: for a revised version, Claude goes back over the dated history of your remarks (“what I said”); any change of view is presented as an argued update of your position, never as a contradiction. Each of the authors’ responses is examined point by point, never with a generic comment.
- Keep a record: completed reviews feed into your career file.
Deliverable
A sorted queue of solicitations, refusals sent in one go, reports returned on time.
Safeguards
A manuscript entrusted to you for review is confidential: do not upload it to any tool without checking the journal’s policy on AI use. The scientific judgement remains the reviewer’s.
Starter prompt
Here are the review invitations I received this month. Sort them into “legitimate and in my field”, “legitimate but outside my field” and “dubious”, with the warning signs, then draft a short decline message. Do not send anything.