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In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a new editor writes:
Do you usually ask more junior or more senior people as referees? *Should* one ask more junior or senior people? All else being equal.
For background, I have never received any advice on this front, formally or informally.
Good questions: it would be great to hear from editors on how they look for referees!
Thanks to the OP for taking up the job. Journal editing is important and rewarding, but there’s often little onboarding and unclear or unstated expectations about how to proceed with it.
For context, I was an associate editor for BJPS for many years. I did not have any rule about preferring senior or junior faculty, and I wouldn’t recommend treating senior/junior as a relevant consideration. Senior folks (allegedly) accept less often, but by the same token junior people might do so too, since they are busy with pre-tenure responsibilities. Senior people might know the field more broadly, but junior scholars might be more in touch with current work. The fact that these competing stereotypes can be so easily generated should tell you how little value they have.
Instead I used a bag of heuristics, most of which are pretty obvious but time-consuming. For topics I know well, I can usually recall the names of several people off the top of my head. But just relying on availability risks entrenching all sorts of biases as well as burning out the same group of referees. So I would compile a list of possible candidates by looking at who the paper is in dialogue with, whose work is prominently cited and discussed, and who else has published substantially on the topic in recent years. This often involved quite a bit of searching through PhilPapers and other databases; more importantly, you actually have to read the submitted paper carefully and discern what the crucial issues are, as well as what discourses they are embedded in. And save your work, so you don’t have to re-do the same search for the next paper in that area. Beyond that, the only other useful bit of advice is to remember who writes bad reports and avoid using them in the future.
Good luck–for what it’s worth, I found being an editor to be the best way to stay on top of what is actually going on in at least some section of the fields I work on.
Usually my first choice is someone I think is best suited to the paper area-wise, who I think there is some chance will accept the request. I don’t tend to think about junior vs. senior in that decision. If I know the sub-sub-area well enough, there are usually a few obvious choices. If they decline, I use some mix of my own further knowledge (if I have any), their suggestions (though not without checking the person out), philpapers/philpeople/google, or, occasionally, asking friends/colleagues who are more knowledgeable about the sub-sub-area for suggestions. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever once thought about whether the person is tenured in making these decisions. I’ve never asked a grad student to referee before, but I’m not against it. I guess I think all things equal it is better to ask senior people who publish a lot first for equity reasons, but, those are often people who immediately decline (or just don’t respond–junior people tend to at least respond!), so I might count them out too quickly. Your post has made me realize I should probably try them first even if I think they are going to decline or not respond, since I think there are defeasible equity reasons in favor of doing so. But I don’t think there are even super strong equity reasons to favor senior people (they are often (not always!) more overburdened with service tasks than junior people, may be editing themselves, etc., and importantly, you probably don’t know exactly how good of a department or university or professional citizen they are when you are asking them…). So I wouldn’t sweat it much, personally.
I know you are really seeking the perspective of editors of philosophy journals but … I am a philosopher and I was an editor for PLOS One for six years (one of 5,000 editors). PLOS One has an elaborate “referee-bank” which can generate a list of 50+ potentional referees, given the paper topic (and abstract and key words). I then selected appropriate referees (whose past performance I could also access). I would select TWO and then select about eight backup choices – these people would automatically be contacted if one of my two choices declined. With PLOS One I was looking for people with topic expertise (whether junior or senior). The journal has a separate unit that was responsible for checking the statistical analyses.
My biggest obstacle in asking junior people is that I often don’t know who the relevant junior people are (outside my particular sub-specialities). So hey everyone—if you decline a referee request, please list any junior scholars you know who could do a good job. That’s the best way for editors to find out!
I wouldn’t worry too much about junior / senior.
I think a common heuristic is just “who do I know who works in this area / on this topic”. A slightly improved version of that heuristic is “who does the author cite (but neither too centrally nor too peripherally)”. However, my preferred heuristic—which I think I learned about from Brian Weatherson on social media—is to do a search in PhilPapers of who has published recently in this area / on this topic.
I’ve been an associate editor at a generalist journal for almost four years. The only respect in which I would pay attention to the junior/senior divide is to keep in mind that (1) your journal may have a policy against inviting PhD students as referees, and (2) senior people (particularly ‘fancy’ or ‘famous’ ones) are more likely to say no. In terms of more general advice for finding referees, some journals have databases that allow you to look up potential candidates by key-words. (This obviously has drawbacks inasmuch as not everyone is in the database and not all who are register their specialties, but it’s a start.) Other strategies include (i) combing the submitted paper’s bibliography and (ii) heading to Philpapers/Philpeople to see who else has published on the topic.
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