From the inbox:
Ms. Ref. No.: [redacted]
Title: [article title] [journal]This is an automated reminder. If you already submitted your review, or if you have sent us an email regarding your review, please disregard this reminder.
Dear Dr. Whitehead,
You kindly accepted our invitation and agreed to review the aforementioned manuscript on May 03, 2017. Your review of this manuscript (please see abstract below) is now overdue. The review was due on: May 23, 2017.
We would be grateful if you could submit your review of this manuscript as soon as possible.
If however you are unwilling or unable to review this particular manuscript, please reply to this email and let us know. We would be grateful for any recommendations for alternate reviewers you can give.
My reply:
[journal],
This review is next up. I had a few ahead of it and didn't realize that the deadline was only 3 weeks from the time I accepted the assignment.
Thanks,
John Whitehead
P.S. 3 weeks? Is there any academic who happens to deal with the normal craziness of work life that can drop everything and conduct and [sic] unpaid review in that amount of time? I'd like to see your stats on whether short deadlines (a) changes the acceptance rate and (b) increases the time to decision. As far as I'm concerned, I won't accept any more review assignments that so casually dismiss the value of unpaid referee time.
I suspect I might be part of a referee experiment. Group A is treated normally (4-6 week deadline) and Group B is treated like chumps (3 week deadline). The hypothesis is that if you treat referees like chumps then they will act more like chumps. Behavioral economics, I guess.
