Fig. 2
The a total number of reviewers invited, b average number of invitations sent to each unique reviewer, and c proportion of reviewers invited more than one time within a given year, for “standard papers” (defined as in Fig. 1) submitted to six journals of ecology and evolution. The five journals published by the British Ecological Society (Functional Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Journal of Ecology, and Methods in Ecology and Evolution) share a common reviewer database; the line labeled BES (top brown line, filled circles) is the average number of invitations sent to each unique reviewer across all five BES journals. These estimates (all lines in b and c) likely underestimate the true number of invitations sent to each researcher due to duplicate accounts in ScholarOne Manuscripts, though this error should be very small. We exclude 2015 (all journals), 2009 for Methods in Ecology and Evolution and 2007 for Evolution because we have data for only part of those year and thus numbers of invitations are not comparable with other years. Analysis for (B): Analysis of covariance, log(NumberOfTimesInvited) = Year + Journal + Year*Journal interaction, with year as a covariate; Year: F1,81301 = 4.64, P = 0.03; Journal: F5,81301 = 27.0, P < 0.001; Year*Journal: F1,81301 = 27.1, P < 0.001. The means here differ slightly from those in Albert et al. (2016) for the journals / years in common between studies because (A) duplicate accounts are merged as found, reducing the number of unique reviewers and thus increasing our means per individual reviewer relative to theirs, and (B) in early years of the dataset their dataset double counts review invitations for reviewers of papers that were invited for revision, inflating their estimates for some journals and years (this is especially evident for Functional Ecology and Journal of Applied Ecology; see text for details)