How to find reviewer opportunities

Find their contact info on their journal’s website and reach out to them. Journal editors are often open to hearing from graduate students and postdocs looking to review papers.

"I don’t know an editor who’s going to say, ‘No, I don’t want your help,’" says William Stoops, PhD, editor of Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. "They may not have a paper for you right away, but they’d be happy to keep you in mind for something in the future."

On the job training. Most novice reviewers will start out by co-­reviewing papers with their academic supervisors. Typically, a student or postdoc will do the bulk of the work, and the supervisor will oversee the review and perhaps add in his or her two cents. You can ask the faculty you work with to consider involving you in preparing reviews they are invited to write.

Also, be sure to check out Translational Issues in Psychological Science (TPS), a journal co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) and the APA journals program. Edited by Mary Beth Kenkel, PhD, dean of the College of Psychology and Liberal Arts at the Florida Institute of Technology, TPS involves psychologists-in-training in all stages of the peer-review process. Students and early career psychologists co-author the articles with a senior psychologist, serve as reviewers and have the chance to serve as an associate editor for one or more issues. Each issue covers a different theme within psychology. Previous issues have focused on topics such as sleep, trauma, aging and humor.

APAGS members and postdoctoral scholars with peer-review experience—either as a reviewer or as an author of a reviewed manuscript, regardless of whether it was accepted—can get online reviewer training. All eligible trainees will then be entered into the TPS reviewer pool and matched up with a manuscript that aligns with their field of study.

Previous associate editors are prepared to serve on editorial boards of other journals and continue to serve as mentors to a new generation of TPS reviewers. Learn more at www.apa.org/pubs/journals/tps/call-for-reviewers. —Chris Palmer, PhD