Reviewing is caring! Revaluing a critical, but invisibilized, underappreciated, and exploited academic practice
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-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 language | English |
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Article number | 13505084251343672 |
Journal | Organization |
Number of pages | 17 |
ISSN | 1350-5084 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 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).
- General Environmental Science
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
- Strategy and Management
- Business, Management and Accounting(all)
- Management of Technology and Innovation
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- ethico-politics, feminist care theory, open science, peer review, Review system
- Management studies