# How much should we review?

There’s an discussion going on over at Crooked Timber on how many papers one should agree to review. Most of the commenters are in the social sciences, but one pointed to an essay by William F. Perrin in a recent issue of Science that suggests the following formula:

$R = \kappa \cdot S$

where $R$ is the number of reviews you should do, $\kappa$ is the number of reviews required per paper, and $S$ is the number of papers you have submitted. I’m guessing that means “papers on which you are the primary author,” but the formula seems reasonable. I wonder how the reviewing load for the Transactions on IT is actually distributed. Perhaps that might be a good survey for the IT Society, or maybe statistics can be gathered from the Pareja database.

I guess $\kappa=3$ or $\kappa=4$ is the usual figure people mention. In terms of Information Theory, its relatively narrow in that ISIT, ITW and Allerton are pretty much the only conferences and almost all full papers appear in the transactions. It would be interesting if the transactions could add to the annual reviewer list how many journal and conference papers each reviewer reviewed. For profs who use supervised reviewing as part of student training, a system could award half credits to each.