Bot-Tastic: Overload Burden of Unsolicited Peer Review Requests, Field of Expertise, and Narrative Hot-Takes

The authors aimed to quantify and analyze the burden of unsolicited peer review requests on senior academic physicians, examining factors such as relevance, prior relationships with journals, and emotional responses to these requests. Their study found that a majority of solicitations were from unfamiliar journals and often deemed irrelevant, leading to high rates of declined or ignored requests and feelings of frustration among reviewers. The findings suggest a need for editors to improve the peer review request process to mitigate reviewer fatigue.