Review in a week*

25 Sep 2019 . category: research . Comments

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.

Stuart James Publons graph captured 25/09/2019

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.


Stuart James

Assistant Professor in Visual Computing at Durham University. Stuart's research focus is on Visual Reasoning to understand the layout of visual content from Iconography (e.g. Sketches) to 3D Scene understanding and their implications on methods of interaction. He is currently a co-I on the RePAIR EU FET, DCitizens EU Twinning, and BoSS EU Lighthouse. He was a co-I on the MEMEX RIA EU H2020 project coordinated at IIT for increasing social inclusion with Cultural Heritage. Stuart has previously held a Researcher & PostDoc positions at IIT as well as PostDocs at University College London (UCL), and the University of Surrey. Also, at the University of Surrey, Stuart was awarded his PhD on visual information retrieval for sketches. Stuart holds an External Scientist at IIT, Honorary roles UCL and UCL Digital Humanities, and an international collaborator of ITI/LARSyS. He also regularly organises Vision for Art (VISART) workshop and Humanities-orientated tutorials and was Program Chair at British Machine Conference (BMVC) 2021.