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A few years ago, upon receiving an invitation to review a paper, my consideration was: Do I accept it or not?
Today, my first consideration is: Should I even bother to reply?
Putting on my journal editor hat then, I wonder: what does an invitation mail have to look like so that people feel motivated to reply?
@khinsen I reviewed a paper a few months ago with a clearly sycophantic introduction that had all the hallmarks of ChatGPT, plus a project home page that didn't exist, and more.
The project code had oodles of lines which was almost certainly LLM generated, as it was not needed or relevant, and in some cases wrapping other code which said "do not use in future work".
IMO it should have been desk rejected, and never gotten to me.
I need to know that the editor is not going to waste my time.
@khinsen the honest answer is, a combination of whether I know and respect the editor, and whether the paper looks interesting to read.
@jonmsterling @khinsen
Very similar to my criteria, but I add, 'do I care about potentially targeting this journal with my own research?'. Interdisciplinary work means I don't always know editors.
Interesting topic is very important. I never want to be the reviewer who says, 'this isn't interesting (to me)', having been on the receiving end multiple times.
I do respond to review invitations, apart from when the journal's sketchy or treated me badly as a reviewer. I ignore those entirely.
@mplouffe That's pretty close to my strategy as well for *accepting* invitations.
For replying vs. deleting, the idea is "sketchy journal" but operationally, it's watching out for phrases such as "I hope this e-mail finds you well", and incoherent keywords. Lastly: Journal "Computing and mechanics" asking me to review a paper on the possibility of life on Mars - that one was so weird that I was briefly tempted to accept!
@khinsen @jonmsterling
Now that sounds interesting!
Strangest one I had was from a mid-tier agriculture journal. The manuscript was something about trade in some agricultural good between two countries, so obviously(!?) I came to mind.
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