What motivates people to review articles? The case of the human-computer interaction community

Recruiting qualified reviewers, though challenging, is crucial for ensuring a fair and robust scholarly peer review process. We conducted a survey of 307 reviewers of submissions to the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011) to gain a better understanding of their motivations for reviewing. We found that encouraging high-quality research, giving back to the research community, and finding out about new research were the top general motivations for reviewing. We further found that relevance of the submission to a reviewer’s research and relevance to the reviewer’s expertise were the strongest motivations for accepting a request to review, closely followed by a number of social factors. Gender and reviewing experience significantly affected some reviewing motivations, such as the desire for learning and preparing for higher reviewing roles. We discuss implications of our findings for the design of future peer review processes and systems to support them.