How to suggest reviewers for a journal submission, and who to avoid.

To suggest reviewers for a journal submission, name three to five researchers who currently publish on your paper's specific problem, who have no recent connection to you or your co-authors, and who can be reached at an institutional email address. Take the names from your reference list and from recent issues of the target journal, then check each one against the publisher's conflict rules before you type it in. Some journals leave the field optional. Fill it anyway, because it is one of the few places in a submission where the editor can see how well you know your own field.

Why do journals ask authors to suggest reviewers?

Because finding willing reviewers is the slowest step in peer review, and the author is usually the person best placed to know who works on the paper's exact question. Your suggestions cut the editor's search time.

They also say something about you. An editor handling dozens of submissions cannot know the active researchers in every subfield the journal covers. A list naming people who published on your problem within the last two years reads as the work of someone inside the conversation. A list naming the three most cited professors in the discipline, all of whom decline invitations weekly, reads as a list assembled from a textbook.

How many names should you give, and where do you find them?

Give as many as the form requests, and when it sets no number, three to five. Fewer than three leaves the editor nowhere to go when the first name declines. More than six starts to look like a campaign.

Your reference list is the first source. Work through it, mark the authors your paper builds on or argues with, and keep the ones still publishing on the topic. Recent issues of the target journal are the second source, since their authors are people the editor already knows how to reach. Conference sessions where your work would sit are the third.

Then filter. Drop anyone retired, anyone on the list for reputation alone, and the household names who spend their week declining invitations. Aim for the band of researchers who would recognize your problem at a glance and might realistically say yes. For each survivor, confirm the current affiliation and find the institutional email address. If the form offers a reason field, one factual clause carries it: published three papers on this sampling method since 2023.

Most submission systems collect the names in a dedicated step. A few journals ask for them in the letter instead, alongside the declarations covered in how to write a journal cover letter, so check the guide for authors before you assume the box exists.

Which conflicts disqualify a suggested reviewer?

Anyone whose report the editor could not weigh as independent: co-authors, recent collaborators, colleagues at your institution, and anyone who supervised you or was supervised by you. Elsevier's guidance to authors draws the line at colleagues and at anyone you have co-authored or collaborated with during the last three years, and asks for suggestions from different countries than the author group. Other publishers phrase the rule differently and land in roughly the same place.

None of this accuses your collaborators of dishonesty. A report from your 2024 co-author might be scrupulously fair, but the editor has no way to establish that, so the safest reading is to set the report aside. Your suggestion slot is spent either way.

Supervision is the exception that never expires. The three-year clock applies to collaboration, and a thesis relationship is more than collaboration. A former supervisor fails the independence test on sight, whatever the calendar says.

How carefully should you use the opposed reviewers field?

Very. Name one or two people at most, give a short factual reason, and never oppose someone because they might dislike your conclusions.

Legitimate entries exist. A group racing you to the same result has a competing interest in delaying your paper. A documented personal or legal dispute qualifies. What does not qualify is theoretical disagreement, and listing a rival school's members one by one actively hurts you, because it shows the editor exactly where the paper feels fragile. Disagreement gets settled in the open, in review and in your reply, and you can disagree with a reviewer politely far more safely than you can exclude one in advance.

The field is a request, not a veto. Editors keep the final call, and a long opposed list reads as an author trying to hand-pick the panel. One restrained, reasoned entry gets taken seriously. Six do not.

What do editors do with your list?

They treat it as leads, not instructions. An editor may invite every name you gave, one of them, or none, and will usually mix any suggested reviewer with reviewers found independently.

Expect the names to be verified. In 2017, Springer retracted 107 papers from the journal Tumor Biology after finding that reviews had come back under the names of real researchers through fabricated email addresses supplied at submission, and the journal was later dropped by the company that assigns impact factors. That episode is why a personal email on a suggested reviewer now raises questions no author wants raised. Give details that survive checking: full name, institution, institutional address, and the one-line reason the person fits.

If nobody from your list gets invited, nothing is lost. The editor still saw a set of names that mapped your field correctly, and that impression outlasts the box.

The suggested reviewer step sits near the end of a longer submission checklist, after the files, statements, and formatting rules that decide desk rejections. Those written rules can be checked before you submit, and Waraq reviews a manuscript against the target journal's own rulebook so that they are settled before an editor opens the file. The reviewer box is the part that stays yours. It asks whether you know who your readers are, and five credible names answer it better than any sentence in the cover letter.