Notes from the Editors

Extract

Before we introduce the excellent research, which we proudly publish in this new issue of the American Political Science Review, we want to start our Notes from the Editors with discussing an issue facing many journals: conserving and refreshing the reviewer pool. Following the trend of previous years, we experienced an increase in submissions over the past twelve months, amounting to more than 1,200 manuscripts. Accordingly, we sent out more than 4,000 invitations to review. We would like to use this opportunity to thank the more than 1,900 reviewers who completed in total 2,272 reviews, which is an increase of accepted invitations by almost five percent. At the same time, the growing number of submissions indicate a dilemma facing editors: while we feel encouraged by the growing number of submissions, the reviewer pool remains limited. If we invite our colleagues to review too often, we risk increasing the widely observed reviewer fatigue, leading not only to a lower response rate to our invitations, but also a lower quality of reviews.