Need to find reviewers, examiners, speakers, or referees: Publish or Perish comes to the rescue

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find good candidates for academic service roles

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 25 Nov 2025 16:36)

There are many academic settings in which experts are needed: reviewers for journals or conferences, editorial board members, examiners for PhD theses, keynote speakers, discussants, track chairs or session chairs for conferences, academic mentors, referees, etc. Oftentimes, we try to find these experts in our own networks. Although this has definite advantages, such as higher levels of trust and commitment, it can be problematic:

  • First, it means you might miss the best person for the job as you are not casting the net widely enough. 
  • Second, whilst you may be able to find a good expert, this person might already heavily overcommitted and needs to say no to most requests. 
  • Third, relying on our personal networks often reinforces existing inequalities. Whilst inequalities in terms of gender and race are fairly well-know, I argue that generational inequalites might be crucial too.

As senior academics (those most likely to need experts) our network is often composed mainly of our contemporaries, interspersed with a few of our PhD students. Relying on this network only when searching for experts makes it very hard for junior academics to build up their profiles. Moreover, senior academics might already be heavily overcommitted and might not always be the best qualified, especially in situations where knowledge of the latest developments is needed.

So, I suggest you follow a two-step process. First, ask one or more of your junior colleagues for  their suggestions; their network will include more of the next generation of academics. You can then use Publish or Perish to evaluate these suggestions.

Publish or Perish comes to the rescue

Here, I discuss how to use PoP to evaluate someone as an editorial board member. However, the mechanisms that are involved are very similar for other functions. Typically, there are several things that you would like an incumbent to display: academic credibility, some expertise in the (sub)discipline, some experience with the journal, and – in some cases – expertise in specific geographic areas.

Academic credibility

The first question would be: Does the prospective editorial board member (or reviewer or examiner or speaker or referee…) have a credible publication record? If one is selecting an editorial board member for a prestigious journal, there should be some evidence of publications that have had an impact on the field and of a sustained stream of research output. This can be easily evaluated by looking at the number of publications and citations that PoP reports for them.

Expertise in the area in question

The prospective editorial board member should also have expertise in the disciplinary orientation of the journal or the sub-discipline that is currently underrepresented. A quick perusal of the titles of their publications should be sufficient to establish this.

For some journals it might be important to have a broad orientation so that one is able to review in a range of different, but related areas. Other journals might prefer specialists, either because the journal is a specialist journal itself (e.g., International Journal of Nuclear Desalination), or because the journal has a more general orientation, but only publishes the very best research in each sub-discipline (e.g., Science).

Experience with the journal

An editor will also want to know whether the prospective editorial board member has experience with the journal. Most journals will keep systematic files on their ad-hoc reviewers. So, if the prospective board member has been a successful ad hoc reviewer, they can be expected to have sufficient experience with the journal.

However, editors would normally give preference to academics that have published in the journal themselves. Publish or Perish makes it very easy to run a quick search on this using a combination of author and journal field searches or – for a cleaner result – review someone’s GS Profile, sorting by publication name.

The screenshot above displays the results of a search for one of my former PhD students – Sebastian Reiche – and the top journal in our field: Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). A search for an academic’s full publication record also allows an editor to assess whether the academic has knowledge of the publication processes in other key journals in the field. Below you can see the results of a GS Profile search for my own name, sorted by journal with two of the key journals in my field visible.

Both searches would also show whether the academic’s experience with the journal is recent. As can be seen above, Sebastian published four articles and a book review in JIBS in the last five years, whereas I have very few recent publications in JIBS and Journal of World Business, reflecting my changing research interests, away from International Business and towards Transforming Academia. 

Geographical scope

Many journals in the Social Sciences will publish work conducted in different countries. To the extent that the country context matter for the research in question, it is important to have editorial board members with a broad geographical experience.

Although it is not always possible to deduce this from the articles titles, in many cases a quick perusal of the PoP results should provide the editor with a feel for the experience the prospective board members has with research in different countries. Looking at their co-authors might also give some clues, to the extent one can deduce nationality from names.

If expertise in specific countries is essential, then using a combination of author and keyword search might help. The screenshot below for instance shows a Web of Science search with the number of articles I have published that included China in the title or abstract. Note that if you conducted this search with Google Scholar, China would be matched anywhere in the document making the search less useful for our current purpose.

Caveats

None of the factors discussed above – academic credibility, expertise in the field, experience with the journal, and geographical scope – can be established with absolute certainty through a PoP search. However, through these searches, the editor can get a feel for the prospective board members that are worthy of further investigation. The same would apply to reviewers, keynote speakers, examiners, or referees.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 25 Nov 2025 16:36

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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