Review in a week*

For a long time now, I have been reviewing articles at a variety of journals and conferences, which is “usually” tracked within publons. While I try hard to make sure that I get reviews completed before the deadline often, when it comes to Journals, this is accomplished in the final few days before the deadline. This creates a significant stress and anxiety to my academic life, as I’m constantly worrying about the tasks that I have to do, and in some cases staying up late to get the review completed. Therefore, as I review my activities, I consider how I can improve the way I review, and therefore I propose (not originally) review in a week*.

While I (generally) steadily increase in review articles per year, it becomes more critical to review effectively.

So I put this out there, that going forward, my goal is to review journal articles within a week* of accepting them. For anyone even partially observant I am diligent in including an asterisk after this statement. Naturally, this is for a good reason; a 20+ page article isn’t sensible to keep to this goal or if I’m very aware that I can not complete due to other commitments, e.g. travel. However, within a week of office time, the review will be complete.

There is a second part to this that is saying “No”. If I’m accepting articles I’m not excited about then this goal will be significantly hard to achieve. Therefore, hand-in-hand, I will be more proactive in saying no to articles that don’t interest me.

As I consider it essential to evaluate any objective; therefore, at the end of 2019, I will review this progress. Which gives me a wonderful excuse to create graphs of my progress (which all academics enjoy), but I will have to put some thought into what to plot.

So Journals! Let’s see what you have install for September-December of 2019.