I am an independent researcher (without affiliations). Where can I find articles to peer-review?

Question

I am an independent researcher in the field of data science, discrete mathematics and parallel computing. I looked up Elsevier and MDPI. They all ask for affiliations to allow me to peer-review. Is there a place I can peer-review articles without having to be affiliated to a university or research institute?

Edit: I am asking this because I am applying for green card under EB-1 category which has one of its requirement as peer-reviewing or judging someone's work. I have 3 publications in decently popular journals and about 45 citations in total for them. Alongside, I have written a chapter in a book, published abstracts and represented myself in 3 global conferences.

Answer 1

If you are in the US, you know that you cannot volunteer for jury-duty even though most people hate the idea of having to do jury-duty. It is similar with reviewing. We assume it is better if people get drafted into reviewing.

How do Associate Editors (AE) select reviewers? Usually by looking a people who wrote papers in the field that are knowledgable about the paper. Some journals have editor assistance software that tries to find these people for the associate editors such as MDPI. Usually, an AE reads through the submitted paper and places special attention on the papers cited, as the authors of these papers should be knowledgable, especially if the papers have a good citation count themselves or a published in difficult to get in outlets. If it is a conference, they usually first form a program committee and then papers get reviewed by the committee. Members of the program committee can ask others to review. It's supposed to be highly co-operative. Journals keep tracks of reviewers and ask the AE to grade the reviews. Someone giving poor quality reviews is not likely to be invited again.

If you want to review, you are best of publishing papers in reasonable outlets in your field. It used to be that professors would give their Ph.D. students papers to review (for which they themselves were invited to review) and then discuss the paper with them and the student's review. This is now considered to be a breach of reviewer confidentially if it is done without the knowledge of the AE, but at least it taught students to write good reviews and in the process learn what a good paper is like. This also helped the students to write better papers themselves, of course under guidance and supervision. Being an independent researcher means of course that you are cut of from this type of training.

To get invited to review you first need to have some (good) publications under your belt. If people active in conference organization and journal editing know about you, they might ask you to get involved. It is the quality of your publications that ultimately qualify you as a reviewer. Once you are considered "reviewer material", if you accept the invitation to review, make sure that you submit a good review in a timely manner and communicate with the AE if there are any problems.

Answer 2

As @Thomas Schwarz says, conventional peer reviewers are almost always invited by editors / associate editors based on their prior contributions to a field.

However, there is an alternative of sorts: Have your considered taking up post-publication review? There are sites like PubPeer that allow technical comments on articles that have already been published. PubPeer is useful in that it allows experts to flag potential issues or raise concerns that have been overlooked during the peer review process itself.

Answer 3

The easiest way to get articles to review is to sign up as a reviewer for the journals you're interested in. It's certainly a lot easier to email the journal office than it is to publish tens of articles in the field to establish that you're an expert. Unless (possibly even if) those are top-tier journals, odds are they'll be happy to register you as a reviewer. Doesn't mean you'll get something to review, but your name will in the database, and you will show up whenever they conduct searches for reviewers by research interests (so be sure to keep those updated).

I don't know about MDPI (I've never used Susy, plus MDPI's reviewer selection policy is apparently very strict), but I'm confident that you don't need an affiliation to review for any journal that uses Editorial Manager, which most Elsevier journals use.

Another alternative is to use freestyle, non-journal related platforms like Researchgate to do peer review. It won't be the formal kind that decides if papers are accepted, but it'll still be peer review.

Edit: I've used Susy now, and you can indeed be registered without an affiliation. However, it's a non-negotiable MDPI policy that reviewers must have PhDs, or MDs if you work in medicine. If you can prove that you have a PhD (e.g. you have a personal website with your educational history) then MDPI will probably be happy to register you. You can reach the journal office at [email protected]; you can also send me your details and I'll register you myself.

Answer 4

Depends on the venue but there are generally 3 ways to become a reviewer:

1. Get invited (either by the editorial board/area chairs/etc. or by another reviewer).
2. Apply.
3. Submit a paper to the venue (some venues automatically invite submission authors as reviewers).

But please don't review for pay-walled journals or for outrageously for-profit businesses such as Elsevier: they suck up research budgets, slow down research, and prevent taxpayers from accessing the research they help fund.

Answer 5

There are a number of aspects. For conferences etc. it is generally about being known. Publishing more than once (esp. as non-PhD student) works well. For journals register an account (as if you wanted to submit a paper). Be careful though, you need to do more: you want to be found by the AE. Make sure to fill in the the questions about research areas and keywords (and tick yes on your availability to review). Also make sure that you provide your orcid, and that you have filled your orcid account with as much information as possible (editorial manager provides direct links from the reviewer selection to their orcid).

Then don't aim for the top journals, but be realistic (doing the top journals cannot hurt, but be careful). You can also try to identify a the associate editors that fit your field best and send them an email (it is often hard to find responsive, diligent reviewers).

Answer 6

Every time I peer review for a well-known journal, they ask me to suggest other peer reviewers. If you can convince some people who get a lot of review requests to suggest you, soon you will have many articles to review.