If you have feedback about the above suggestion, or have related suggestions of your own, please share them.
At least part of the “referee crisis” in philosophy comes from the fact that many philosophers are never or only rarely asked to referee. How can editors find these relatively untapped referees?
Mike Titlebaum (Wisconsin) was curious about this and, based on suggestions from others, did a little investigation into how PhilPeople could be of use.
Both David Bourget and David Chalmers, he said, responded enthusiastically to this idea, and he says that Bourget (who had some data confirming the “untapped referees” factor) offered the following advice:
Titlebaum also reports that “Both Davids also had some great ideas for extra search functionality they could add to PhilPeople that would make it even more useful for finding referees.”
Our ‘find a philosopher‘ feature of philpeople is a good start. You have to pick the relevant topic quite narrowly and order by number of publications in the topic, past five years. That gives you as top hits people that are active in the area and have solid publication records. If you don’t do ‘past five years’ you get more senior people, who aren’t going to be new to you or likely to be available.
[Roy Lichtenstein, “Haystack #3”]
