Suggesting Reviewers: Ethical Rules for Authors

Editors welcome reviewer suggestions, but the wrong names or an email address you control can delay handling and trigger an integrity check.

Explainer · 8 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

What good suggestions look like

• Independent experts in the method or topic
• Institutional email addresses
• No recent co-authors, same-institution colleagues, supervisors/students, or close collaborators
• Geographic and gender diversity when possible

"Independent expert" has a working definition. It is someone who could read your manuscript, find its weakest section and write a report on it without asking you anything, and who owes you nothing. Both halves matter. An expert who owes you a favour is not a reviewer. An unconflicted colleague who has never used your method cannot tell the editor whether your analysis holds, and a report that says only that the paper is interesting and well written is worth nothing to the editor deciding it.

The institutional email address is the part that decides how fast your manuscript moves. Editorial staff use it to confirm the person exists at the affiliation you listed, so give the address in the form the university itself publishes: the departmental page, the corresponding-author line of their own recent paper, or their ORCID record. A free-mail address is not automatically sinister — some researchers genuinely list one — but it forces the office to verify by another route, on its timetable rather than yours. If your candidate really has no institutional address in public, use the free-text field to say where you found them and paste the URL of their staff page.

The conflict rules are broader than the word "co-author" suggests. Rule someone out if you have published with them recently, sit on the same grant, belong to the same consortium, share a department or even a different campus of the same university, supervised them or were supervised by them, or thanked them in the acknowledgements of this paper. Supervision does not expire the way a co-authorship window does; a doctoral supervisor is a conflict for the rest of both careers. The useful decision rule is social rather than technical: if you would feel awkward telling the editor exactly how you know this person, do not list them.

Diversity is the bullet people treat as decoration, and it is the one with an immediate practical payoff. Four names from the same lab, the same country or the same annual conference give the editor one pool to fish in, and when two decline the editor is back where they started. Spread the list across institutions and regions, and include people doing good work in your area who are not the four names everybody cites.

Full guide: Suggesting Reviewers

How to build the list

Work outward from the manuscript rather than from memory. Take the two or three papers your method genuinely rests on, then look at who has since used, extended or criticised that method — not the original authors you already know, but the people citing them. Add anyone who has published on your population or your kind of dataset without being part of your network. That usually produces eight or ten candidates. You then delete the conflicted ones and keep whatever survives.

For each surviving name, write one line of justification even when the form does not ask for it. Something like: "Dr Okonkwo applies the same fixed-effects estimator to a different national cohort in her most recent paper, and is not a co-author or collaborator." That line does two jobs. It shows the editor you chose the name for a reason rather than for reachability, and it makes you state the connection out loud, which is where authors usually notice that a candidate sits closer to them than they had been admitting.

Then check each name the way the office will. Search the address, confirm the person is still at that institution, and confirm the spelling matches their publications. Suggesting someone who moved two years ago is not misconduct, but it buys you a bounced invitation and a fortnight of silence.

What is not ethical

• Supplying an email you control
• Suggesting friends who will “be nice”
• Listing people with undisclosed financial conflicts
• Using opposed-reviewer lists to block all critics of your theory

Supplying an address you control is the serious one, and it is worth being precise about what it covers, because the practice has variants people tell themselves are different. Naming a real senior researcher but giving an address that routes to you; registering a domain that resembles an institution; using an address that differs from the genuine one by a single character; letting an agency handle the submission and supply the contact details on your behalf — these are the same act. The invitation arrives somewhere you can reach, a favourable report goes back, and the editor believes an independent expert has read the paper. Nobody has.

It is also caught more readily than authors expect. Free-mail addresses for senior figures, several suggested reviewers sharing one unfamiliar domain, addresses that do not match the stated affiliation, and reports that arrive unusually fast and uniformly positive are all ordinary checks now. The consequences do not stop at rejection: retraction, a letter to your institution, and a lasting association between your name and reviewer fraud for every editor who reads the notice. It takes down co-authors who knew nothing about it, which is generally the part nobody thought through in advance.

Suggesting friends is a smaller version of the same thing. It works less well than people hope, because editors read a report that praises everything and weight it accordingly, and it costs you the one service peer review reliably performs: a stranger finding the error before a reader does. Undisclosed financial conflicts are the quiet variant — the reviewer who consults for the company that funded your trial, or who is named on a competing patent. Knowing about the interest and saying nothing makes the omission yours.

Related: Fake Peer Review and Reviewer Fraud

Opposed reviewers

Allowed when used sparingly with a professional reason (direct commercial competitor, documented personal dispute). A long exclusion list looks defensive.

Keep the request to a couple of names and write the reason as one flat sentence with no adjectives in it. "Professor Hale and I are named on competing patent applications covering the assay described in Section 2" is a reason an editor can act on. "Professor Hale is hostile to our work" is not: it reports that someone disagrees with you, which describes peer review rather than a conflict. Where the dispute is on the record — a formal complaint, an institutional process, an authorship disagreement that was documented — say so plainly and briefly, without narrating the history.

Be clear about what you are asking for. Most editors honour a short, reasoned exclusion request, but none of them guarantee it and few explain the decision. Ask for what you actually need, resist the urge to name every author of every critical commentary, and do not use the field to argue your case. A long exclusion list tells the editor the manuscript comes with a history, which is the opposite of what you wanted the form to say.

If you genuinely cannot suggest anyone

Small fields are real. If everyone qualified has co-authored with you or trained in your group, do not invent a list to fill the boxes. Say so in the cover letter in one sentence, name the two or three research groups active in the area so the editor knows where to look, and leave it there. Editors handle narrow specialties regularly, and an honest note reads far better than four names that turn out on checking to be your collaborators.

Editor reality check

Suggestions are advisory. Editors may use none of them. That is normal.

Editors keep their own reviewer pools, they can see who is currently overloaded, and they often need something your list cannot supply: a statistician for the modelling, a clinician for the endpoint, a second reader from outside your subfield. They also run their own conflict checks and sometimes find one you missed. None of that is a verdict on your paper, and a decision letter carrying reports from people you never proposed is the ordinary outcome rather than a bad sign.

Two habits follow from that. Do not email your suggested reviewers to tell them an invitation is coming — it is usually well meant, and it looks like coordination to anyone auditing the file later. And do not ask the editor whether your names were used; the answer is confidential, and the question is the sort of small thing an editor remembers.

Peer review at Directive Publications: Peer Review Process · Directive Academy