CV entries for peer pre-review

[quasihumanist]

It's becoming increasingly common in my field (mathematics) for the more prestigious journals to have a pre-review process.  When they receive a paper, they send it to one or two relatively senior people for an opinion on whether the purported contents of the paper are significant enough for publication in that journal.  If these senior people say yes, then they send it to a usually more junior person to do a real peer review that involves reading the paper carefully, hopefully checking that the arguments are sound, and giving actual useful comments to the authors.

The reason for this process is that a thorough peer review of a paper is a significant amount of work, probably around 20-30 hours for an average length paper, and hence a thorough peer review can take 6 months or a year to be completed.  A pre-review can usually be done in 2-3 hours at most and is easier to fit into a busy schedule.

There is a section in my CV for peer reviewing where I list the journals for which I have done peer review (with a month and year in the university internal version).  Until now, I have only listed full reviews.  Should I list pre-reviews that I have done?  Should this be a separate section?

[onthefringe]

This sounds like one where field norms are going to muddy the waters a lot. But based on your description, it sounds like being asked to do "pre-reviews" is a sign of stature, in which case, I would probably include it as a separate section, especially in a CV that was being reviewed for a promotion or for some sort of prize/recognition.

[traductio]

The reason for this process is that a thorough peer review of a paper is a significant amount of work, probably around 20-30 hours for an average length paper, and hence a thorough peer review can take 6 months or a year to be completed.

My goodness -- I do a lot of peer review, and if each review took me 20–30 hours (instead of 2–3), well, I guess I'd have to say no to 90% of them. Wow.

(And yet it still takes six months or a year in my field -- communication -- to get reviews back.)

[mleok]

As an applied mathematician, the time I spend on a review does not exceed 4 hours, and I would spend around 30 minutes at most on a determination about whether a paper is significant enough to warranty a full review. I've ever checked every single calculation in a paper during a review, nor have I received reviews which would suggest that a referee has done the same for my papers.

[jerseyjay]

That sounds like a lot of work. I will leave it to the mathematicians to decide if that work is necessary. In my field (history) peer reviews take a lot less actual work, although it still usually takes no less than six months to hear back from a journal.

[For information: I just did a review of an article yesterday. I read it (about an hour), taking notes while reading. I had to look some stuff up, but I did not go  over the author's sources. (If the author plagiarized, made up stuff, or misrepresented stuff, I really wouldn't notice, unless I have more personal knowledge of the sources used.).
Then it took about an hour to write up my notes. Probably another 20 minutes trying to navigate the stupid online system the journal has. So three hours, give or take, but sometimes it is longer if the paper is poorly written, or is more complicated.]

In regards to the actual question: I assume that maths professors have their own norms. That said, in my CV as a historian, I list (under service to the profession) all the journals and presses I have done reviews for. Since I have done both book and journal reviews, I list them separately. I might suggest you do the same thing, perhaps under the headings, "Full Peer Review" and "Initial Review" or something.

I do not think this would make or break any tenure or promotion application, but it does show your are esteemed enough to ask and dedicated enough to do both types of review.

[Hibush]

You might as well include those. There is no mathematical formula relating time spent on manuscript review to job performance or professional stature. These show qualitatively that editors see you as a well-rounded authority. The record is a datum that can be used to support claims along those lines in performance reviews, promotion documents or award nominations.

[Vkw10]

Could you do something like:

PEER REVIEWS
Journal A, 2021 (1 full review, 3 initial), 2020 (2 full, 1 initial)

That seems to avoid the appearance of padding, while showing people familiar with the field that you're recognized as a senior scholar by editors of prestigious journals.

20-30 hours to review an article? Ouch! I've spent up to eight hours, for a paper that showed promise but needed extensive revisions or for a paper where I suspected the author was misrepresenting a cited article, but 4-5 hours is typical.

[Parasaurolophus]

I would distinguish that work from ordinary refereeing, just as I distinguish between conference, journal, and book refereeing.

I have one friend who's a logician at a major Canadian R1. I really don't envy them their referee work, which typically seems to involve combing through 40-80 pages' worth of proofs mobilizing stuff from several different areas of mathematics and logic. Just checking the work, even in cases where you don't need to bone up at all, must be exhausting.

Never mind writing up one of your own!