Is there a point where ad hoc review requests become excessive?

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futureapppsy2

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Asking because this one legit journal (which I really like and is very much in my area of expertise) has asked me for four reviews in the last two weeks. I asked about being on the editorial board last year after they asked for like 7 reviews in three months and got told basically “maybe but probably not.” It feels like I’m doing editorial board-level lifting without the recognition, tbh.

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I’ll buy you a steak dinner if this isn’t a case of “Old people refuse to retire”.
 
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Four in two weeks is ludicrous. In every AE interface I’ve seen, you see the last review date and number of outstanding reviews each reviewer has so it’s not like it’s happenstance/mistake.
I say no to way more reviews now, unless it’s for a journal I’m on the board for or the paper is one I would be uniquely suited to review.
 
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I wonder if for some reason more reviewers have been turning these down recently, resulting in the folks who do actually complete them to be getting more than their usual (fair) share of requests?
When COVID lockdowns were on I had to ask double or sometimes triple the usual number of folks before I found people to agree.
But I just dug deeper in the reviewer dockets; I didn’t ask the same people for more.
 
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When COVID lockdowns were on I had to ask double or sometimes triple the usual number of folks before I found people to agree.
But I just dug deeper in the reviewer dockets; I didn’t ask the same people for more.
Makes sense and aligns with my experience as a reviewer--I got a few more requests than usual over the first few months of COVID, but it's since calmed down. Two of the requests (from the same journal) occurred almost simultaneously, but I think that was just an administrative mix-up.
 
Wow, that is definitely a little excessive. I try to average around 2/month (total), but that is split over probably 5-10 journals I review regularly (with a few others here-and-there). Refusing the request to be on the editorial board is a little nuts for the amount of work you are doing for them. I'm also a little surprised. What do they have to lose other than two lines of print? Its not like there is some hard limit on how many folks you can have on the editorial board or that these folks are usually compensated in any meaningful way.

I'd just refuse to review for them moving forward, or at least review very selectively. There is one journal *cough* Children and Youth Services Review *cough* that after an incredibly negative experience publishing in and the editor proving himself to be an incompetent jackass, I now take great pleasure in responding to each review request with "Based on my experiences with this journal, I do not consider this to be a legitimate outlet and thus do not want to support it by doing reviews." Oddly enough, they continued to send me review requests despite those comments though they finally seem to have stopped.
 
Wow, that is definitely a little excessive. I try to average around 2/month (total), but that is split over probably 5-10 journals I review regularly (with a few others here-and-there). Refusing the request to be on the editorial board is a little nuts for the amount of work you are doing for them. I'm also a little surprised. What do they have to lose other than two lines of print? Its not like there is some hard limit on how many folks you can have on the editorial board or that these folks are usually compensated in any meaningful way.

I'd just refuse to review for them moving forward, or at least review very selectively. There is one journal *cough* Children and Youth Services Review *cough* that after an incredibly negative experience publishing in and the editor proving himself to be an incompetent jackass, I now take great pleasure in responding to each review request with "Based on my experiences with this journal, I do not consider this to be a legitimate outlet and thus do not want to support it by doing reviews." Oddly enough, they continued to send me review requests despite those comments though they finally seem to have stopped.
Honestly, glad to know that I’m not the only one who has had super weird experiences with CYSR ( which is *not* the journal in my OP, btw).
 
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