From the Editor—A Peer Review Crisis or New Normal?

It has been an unusual two and a half years dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the reckoning with racial injustice in the United States, and a deeply divided society. Academic faculty have experienced steeper workloads due to shifting teaching modalities, caregiving responsibilities, emotionally supporting and mentoring students, and adjusting research for pandemic restrictions. All these changes fall on top of the stressors we have experienced personally from these trying times. It is not surprising that in the aftermath of this worldwide pandemic and other societal stressors, academic faculty have needed some room to rest, recover, and even deal with burnout. As we recover, there is a need to prioritize the work that we value most. In addition to finding meaning in what we do and where we spend our time, it is also important—as with any disaster—to assess the damage and decide what we want to repair. As an editor, I want to highlight the recent crisis in peer review and ask you to consider or reconsider your participation in this process. Like so many other vulnerabilities in societal systems laid bare during the pandemic, the delicate system of peer review that relies on the goodwill, and often free labor of our peers, has pushed this system to a potential breaking point (Dance, 2022; Flaherty, 2022). While there was an exponential increase in journal submissions in 2020 (Else, 2020) and reviews focused on COVID-19 were quicker and more responsive to start, timely peer review has become less reliable in the last year or so (Dance, 2022; Flaherty, 2022). The Journal of Social Work Education (JSWE) also experienced a larger number of submissions, and much fewer reviewers who were available for peer review in the last couple of years. If invited reviewers do not respond in a timely way, it can lengthen the peer-review process by several months. It has been sad to observe this process, particularly when I get e-mails from earlycareer colleagues who depend on timely peer review. As the editor of JSWE, there are times—especially during the pandemic and lately—where we invite eight or more people to review a paper before we secure reviewers. These experiences also hit home as an author. Within the last week, I received a returned manuscript held for 1 year with one of our primary professional journals with no peer review and a note from the editor that it was being released because no peer reviewers would accept it for review. This was particularly disheartening, as it was an article with two early-career colleagues. I invite you to consider your commitment as a peer reviewer as we emerge into this new normal. Peer review is an opportunity to speak into the profession and minimize the chances that a small number of peers, often fewer experts with the necessary breadth of expertise and diverse backgrounds (Dance, 2022), are doing this alone. One prepandemic survey found one-fifth of researchers contribute up to 94% of the reviews (Kovanis et al., 2016). A small number of our peers cannot and should not so narrowly dictate the quality of our professional publications. The quality and validity of our profession’s research depends on high-quality review by experts in the field to catch important errors or problems, help peers improve their work, and reject work or scholarship that is not of high quality. Finally, one’s individual scholarship can benefit from ongoing and consistent peer review, with exposure to the new trends and ideas in a specific area of expertise and an opportunity to learn more from current peer-review practices. I get it. We are all tired and maybe burned out. There has been a priority to focus on the tasks that are essential and considered for tenure, promotion, and merit. However, we must be collectively responsible for not just producing scholarship and research, but also ensuring its quality as a profession. While there is an argument that this work should be compensated (Dance, 2022), this is unlikely in the near future. As the editor of JSWE, my work is not compensated, but I find it an honor and deeply important to contribute to social work scholarship. If you have continued to be an JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 58, NO. 4, 619–621 https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2022.2138070