Balancing and redistributing ‘additional’ academic work

I rarely publish anything on the blog related to my day job, reserving it instead to discuss crime fiction. I'm making an exception for this piece as it's too long for a Facebook post and I've no other suitable place to post it.

I’m finding that managing my workload is becoming increasingly difficult. A big part of the issue is an endless stream of requests for work that extends beyond my usual workload. Since January I’ve been keeping a list of such requests. Here’s a summary table of the number and type of request – the list doesn’t include university business/committees, circular spam requests/calls, already existing board commitments, follow-on requests to re-review, requests for copies of papers/info, requests for reviews of novels, my own journal editing work, and student references.

In total I’ve received 194 new requests in the first 26 weeks of 2017, varying between four and ten a week.

42 paper review
16 grant review (one of which was to undertake 12 site reviews of 2 days each)
3 book proposal review
4 book endorsement
2 review book manuscript
5 academic reference/tenure request
3 PhD external examiner
38 research or media interview/survey/seeking advice
12 contribute paper/chapter
4 write a book
6 work on a project
8 appoint to advisory board
49 speak at workshop/conference
1 be a journal editor
1 visiting prof

That’s a lot of potential additional tasks. In fact, taking on all of it would be a full-time job (and even then would involve overtime!). And I take on a quite a few of them – certainly all of the reference, external examining requests and book endorsements, most of the interviews/advice, about a third of paper reviews, grant reviews, speaking at events, contributing paper/chapter, and membership of advisory boards.  That adds up to a lot of service work. All 194 need some correspondence, even if it’s just to say ‘sorry, I can’t do at present’. 

This weight of expectation raises two main questions. First, what is a reasonable acceptance rate for these requests – in total and across types of requests?  Second, what is the distribution of such requests across all academics – and if it’s as asymmetrical as my anecdotal evidence of asking colleagues suggests, what can be done to re-balance the workload?

With respect to the first, undertaking a commensurate number of reviews to work submitted seems like a reasonable, minimum expectation.  So if one submits two articles in a year, one should expect to review six papers in return. Ditto for grant applications, etc. But is there an upper threshold beyond reciprocity where it’s acceptable to flatly turn down additional review work (say 20 papers in per year)? Or if one is a journal editor managing 50+ papers a year can one forego reviewing for other journals? I certainly generate a lot of reviewing work through submitting papers and grant applications, and I’m often asking people to review for Dialogues in Human Geography or contribute chapters to a book. I have a strong sense of obligation to undertake such work in return. Nonetheless, I’m certainly doing a lot more at present than I’m generating and I’m considering adopting an upper-limit on reviews to make things manageable, and only reviewing papers/grants that closely fit my expertise and I’m interested in. I’m not quite sure though what a reasonable upper-limit might be – suggestions welcome.

My own experiences as an editor and asking colleagues chimes with Stuart Eldon’s observations* concerning the ‘exchange economy of peer review’; that is there is a strong asymmetry in the both the requests for reviews and in the acceptance of doing review work (indeed, my anecdotal evidence is that the ‘decline to review’ rate has increased substantially over the past twenty years). Some people get asked a lot, other infrequently; some do a large number of requested reviews, others decline most requests. Of course, there are reasons as to why there is an asymmetry in requests and why people decline. Editors and agencies tend to favour established networks and those with an established profile. Academics are under increasing pressure within their workplaces with respect to teaching, research and admin. Yet, the entire academic system of evaluation is reliant on reciprocal peer review.

My sense is that journals and grant agencies need to get much better at spreading the additional academic work around. There were nearly 10,000 attendees at this year’s Association of American Geographers conference, probably 6,000+ of which were post-PhD academics. There’s a large number of academic geographers across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia. There is no shortage of potential experts to review work and to participate on boards, etc. One ‘rule’ we used to apply when I was editing Social and Cultural Geography was: the three referees had to come from two or more continents and at least one had to be an early career scholar. We would often also look for a reviewer outside of the discipline. A useful addition might be at least one reviewer located outside of Anglo-America, and to also consider issues of gender and race as well. It would also help to diversify editors beyond Anglo-America, thus gaining their networks of scholars (as well as encouraging a more diverse set of submissions and tackling the hegemony of Anglo-American scholarship in leading journals^). Another ‘rule’ some journals apply is that if you submit an article there is an obligation to undertake three reviews in return; if you don’t fulfil this you cannot submit another article to the same journal. In terms of talk and board invitations, I try and pass many of these on to postdocs and early career scholars to help build their profiles. Again, it would be particularly useful to spread invitations with respect to gender and race.

It would be interesting to see some data from journals as to status, location, etc. of who are being invited to review, the decline rates (and who are more likely to decline), and the extent to which people submitting to a journal are being used as referees; also what policies journals and grant agencies have for recruiting referees and tacking decline rates.

While my list of requests might be a few standard deviations from the norm, there are certainly a number of colleagues who are also dealing with a large number of requests and are doing more than their fair share of additional academic labour. My feeling is that we’re long past the point where we need to proactively tackle who gets asked to do what. I’ll continue to do my share, but I’m going to try and better manage requests. My hope is that I won’t need to say 'no' more often because the load is being shared around more effectively. But I suspect that will only happen if there’s a concerted attempt to modify selection procedures for invitation.

Many thanks to folks who wrote comments on a Facebook post I posted a couple of weeks ago about this issue. I’d welcome more feedback – please post a comment.

For a related post on how to deal with requests and when to say 'yes' and 'no', see Rules of thumb for making decisions on requests for academic work

* Elden, S. (2008) The exchange economy of peer review. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 951-953. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/d2606eda

^ Kitchin, R. (2003) Cuestionando y desestabilizando la hegemonia angloamericana y del ingles en geografia. Documents d'Anàlisi Geogràfica 42: 17-36. Reprinted as Disrupting and destabilising Anglo-American and English-language hegemony in Geography in Social and Cultural Geography (2005): 6(1): 1-16. http://eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/3878/1/RK__Disrupting_and_destabilizing.pdf