Using PhilPeople features to find referees?

In response to Helen's recent post on the troubles that journal editors have finding referees and comments by a number of readers there that they are rarely asked to review, Mike Titelbaum (University of Wisconsin-Madison) helpfully writes in that David Bourget and David Chalmers suggest the following feature at PhilPeople:

"Our 'find a philosopher' feature of philpeople is a good start. You have to pick the relevant topic quite narrowly and order by number of publications in the topic, past five years. That gives you as top hits people that are active in the area and have solid publication records. If you don't do 'past five years' you get more senior people, who aren't going to be new to you or likely to be available. I bet many editors would benefit from these simple instructions."

I hope this helps in some small way with the ongoing 'publication emergency', as it might help authors get more timely verdicts while better distributing the burdens on editors and referees.

Comments

[The Expanding Circle (Of Referees)]

Thanks for this post!

We’ve heard from both Helen and Josh Shepherd that referees are hard to come by. Ben Bradley’s comment about Ergo (https://dailynous.com/2022/02/18/is-peer-review-in-philosophy-broken-beyond-reasonable-repair/#comment-430821) suggests something else entirely. I wonder if it would be possible to solicit info from other journals. Would be great to have a better sense of just how big this problem really is…

[Brad]

I routinely use PhilPeople to find people to invite for book reviews for Metascience, the journal I edit. I do not know who is working on all the topics covered of the books for which we commission reviews. But I can find in a few minutes names of people who have published recently on most philosophical topics.