Skip to main content
Fig. 3 | Research Integrity and Peer Review

Fig. 3

From: Recruitment of reviewers is becoming harder at some journals: a test of the influence of reviewer fatigue at six journals in ecology and evolution

Fig. 3

Reviewers who are invited more times within a single calendar year are more likely to decline to review. The Y-axis is the proportion of times an invitee agreed to review, averaged first across unique individuals within a calendar year and then across years within each journal. Invitations greater than 6 per year (x-axis) are excluded (treated as outliers) because sample sizes are very low and the patterns become uninterpretable. The figure and analysis excludes 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. This analysis also excludes reviewers who did not respond to the email invitation; the overwhelming majority of non-responses were unique invitations, suggesting incorrect contact information. Analysis: Analysis of covariance, with each journal contributing one data point per reviewer invitation count per year; model: ProportionAgreed = Year + Journal + TimesInvited + 2-way interactions, with TimesInvited as a continuous variable; Year: F 11,253 = 1.13, P = 0.34; Journal: F 5,253 = 0.71, P = 0.62, TimesInvited: F 1,253 = 54.2, P < 0.001, Year*Journal: F 44,253 = 1.67, P = 0.008, Year*TimesInvited: F 11,253 = 4.64, P < 0.001, Journal*TimesInvited: F5,253 = 2.61, P = 0.03

Back to article page