I have seven referee requests that have come in since January. Haven't looked at any of them yet. It appears my Saturday golf is rained out, so this is not a bad time to clear the desk a little. I plan to spend up to 60 minutes per paper. After today I should be good until September.
Today is refereeing day
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You are going to roast and freeze in all circles of hell.
60 min is a bit short, but you should really not spend more than 3 hours on any referee report. Unless your an ULRM and get a referee request from a top journal. In that case you can take a entire day. Never more than that.
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Let's face it, there's little incentive to referee well. The editor is way too busy to much care about most reviews.
The first thing that I do is search for the working paper, so I can determine who the authors are. Then, I use the table of contents from an econometrics book to point out problems or I criticize the paper for not asking the right question, not making enough of a contribution to the literature, etc.
I never really look at a paper substantively unless I'm sufficiently interested to read to learn something new. If it were that good, wouldn't it be published already?
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I'm not sure how you do it, but I can rarely get a referee report done in 2-3 hours in just one go, unless it's a really bad paper (that makes you even wonder how it made it through the desk-rejection stage). In general I have to work on the paper 2 or 3 separate days, though I'd say I put 1 or 2 hours each day. In the end, it's about 3-4 hours of net time on the report, but I need to leave it for some days in between for any non-obvious case before I can really feel comfortable with my recommendation and assessment.
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OP here. Another refereeing day today. Six papers in the stack, including one from January that I wanted to do last refereeing day, but haven't gotten around to.
Quickly looked at each paper, and pretty sure this is how it's going to pan out:
Paper 1: Poorly written, reject.
Paper 2: Poorly written, reject. (Refereed this one the last time already; nothing changed.)
Paper 3: Questionable results. There may be a serious flaw in the main proof. Will need to read again to be sure, but probably reject.
Paper 4: Fails to cite some literature, otherwise looks good. Probably R&R.
Paper 5: Overselling on steroids. Reject, with recommendation to try 2 tiers down. Don't give a damn that the authors are UHRM.
Paper 6: Terribly confusing. How did this get past the desk? Reject.Depressing.
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F*** you ..you are the shame to profession...
OP here. Another refereeing day today. Six papers in the stack, including one from January that I wanted to do last refereeing day, but haven't gotten around to.
Quickly looked at each paper, and pretty sure this is how it's going to pan out:
Paper 1: Poorly written, reject.
Paper 2: Poorly written, reject. (Refereed this one the last time already; nothing changed.)
Paper 3: Questionable results. There may be a serious flaw in the main proof. Will need to read again to be sure, but probably reject.
Paper 4: Fails to cite some literature, otherwise looks good. Probably R&R.
Paper 5: Overselling on steroids. Reject, with recommendation to try 2 tiers down. Don't give a damn that the authors are UHRM.
Paper 6: Terribly confusing. How did this get past the desk? Reject.
Depressing.