Motivations of Novice and Experienced Female Chinese Applied Linguistics Researchers to Participate in Peer Reviews

ABSTRACT This article reports on an exploratory inquiry into the experiences of novice and experienced female Chinese applied linguistics researchers in their roles as peer reviewers. Using an ecological perspective to situate self‐determination theory, we interpret participants' accounts of reviewing, gathered through semi‐structured interviews, in this inquiry. The analysis suggests that the mesosystem (i.e., institution) has the most noticeable impact on female Chinese novice researchers' motivations to conduct reviews. Under the pressure of performance evaluations and promotion requirements, female Chinese novice researchers tend to be extrinsically motivated to write reviews for journals. In contrast, experienced researchers are likely to be intrinsically motivated as they associate doing reviews with a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The identified differences in the motivations of novice and experienced researchers for acting as reviewers suggest that the internalisation of review motivation—from extrinsic to intrinsic—could be an important part of the participants' professional growth from novice to experienced researchers. This points to opportunities for further study to compare researchers across different disciplines and cultural backgrounds, assessing how their motivations to conduct reviews evolve through different stages of their careers.