Review invitations from journals: A health sciences researcher's experience, 2022–2024

Background: As the number of journals and manuscripts continues to increase, so do the calls on researchers to review. To ensure that researchers accept or decline review invitations quickly and appropriately, review invitations should be informative. Objectives: Review invitations received by one health sciences researcher are sum-marized and invitations from journals listed in Web of Science, Scopus, or Directory of Open Access Journals are compared with invitations from journals listed in none of these three databases. Methods: This quantitative cross-sectional study included review invitations that the author received from journals between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2024. For the analysis, only the most recent review invitation from each journal was included so that the results were not skewed towards journals that requested reviews more fre-quently. Requests for reviews of revised manuscripts were excluded. Results: Review invitations were received from 52 journals, 10 (19%) of which were not listed in any of the three databases. Emails from the 42 listed journals generally provided more, and more appropriate, information such as the manuscript abstract (98% of listed journals vs. 60% of unlisted journals) and addressing the email recipient correctly (62% of listed journals vs. 30% of unlisted journals). For 45% of listed journals and 50% of unlisted journals, the time to review was not stated in the email itself and 74% of listed journals and 80% of unlisted journals made no statement regarding the anonymity (or not) of reviewing. Conclusion: Minimum requirements for review invitations are recommended, as well as areas for further research.