Reviewing is caring! Revaluing a critical, but invisibilized, underappreciated, and exploited academic practice

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

Reviewing is critical to advancing scholarly knowledge by assuring research standards and contouring what counts as novel. Yet, our system of reviewing submissions to journals is in crisis. With growing submission numbers, editors struggle to match these with qualified review capacities, unwillingly adding extra, often uneven, workloads on some reviewers, without equally distributing pressures or finding the “ideal” expert match. We propose to redress this issue in terms of care. Inspired by feminist care theory, we discuss how the current review system invisibilizes, underappreciates, and exploits the care invested in it. Furthermore, we suggest reconsidering the very organizing of the review system along the lines of care to reinvigorate the nurturing, knowledge-enhancing practices of reviewing. Specifically, we recommend (1) increasing the visibility of reviewing across journals, (2) recognizing reviewing as an inherent part of paid scholarly work, and (3) introducing cross-journal review limits. Together, we argue that such moves enable a more visibly appreciative and less easily exploitative organizing of reviewing as a scholarly practice of care that we and all science indeed rely on.

Original languageEnglish
Article number13505084251343672
JournalOrganization
Number of pages17
ISSN1350-5084
DOIs
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2025

Bibliographical note

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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).