October 23, 2026
The scientists on Wild Animal Initiative’s staff spend the majority of their time conducting and sharing their own research. But they’re also involved in a variety of adjacent activities that complement our Research Program and support the wider wild animal welfare research community, like delivering lectures, advising external researchers, and taking part in review processes.
One of the most important of these behind-the-scenes activities is reviewing articles submitted to scientific journals — a process that involves providing expert opinions on the work being conducted by other researchers in wild animal welfare science and closely related areas.
Wild Animal Initiative’s strategy is to build a self-sustaining academic field for wild animal welfare science. Reviewing scientific articles submitted to journals is a high-leverage activity that helps us advance this strategy in a few ways: It works as quality control, as a tool for recruiting scientists to the field, and as a method of seeding ideas. Participating in reviews is also a fundamental part of being a scientist, and ensuring that our researchers are full participants in the academic community helps us build and maintain both our connection to that community and our scientific credibility.
The articles we review
A variety of scientific journals invite our researchers to peer-review articles that have been submitted for publication. These articles have largely been empirical studies, but we have also reviewed perspective articles, commentaries, and literature reviews. They have covered a variety of topics — acoustics, physiology, cognition, and more — in a multitude of species, from insects to birds to mammals.
In a typical year, WAI researchers are asked to review a collective 20 to 30 articles for animal welfare, animal behavior, and conservation journals. Each review takes roughly 4 to 5 hours, so it’s necessary to be selective, evaluating the potential impact that submitted articles might have for the field against the costs of reviewing the article. Our researchers ultimately review roughly 50% of the requests they receive. The articles we reviewed in 2025 focused on topics like welfare assessment, biologging, and contraception as a population management tool.
A core part of field building
Reviewing articles that explicitly focus on wild animal welfare has obvious benefits for the field: By assessing their scientific quality and potential to advance the field, we help ensure that high-quality and high-impact papers in the field are published in reputable journals. In turn, these papers build momentum in the field and generate knowledge that can ultimately help wild animals. Peer review itself also seeds ideas about wild animal welfare, acting as a platform to discuss questions related to wild animal welfare, where both authors and journal editors are part of the discussion.
But reviewing papers that do not explicitly study wild animal welfare (welfare studies of non-wild species, for example, or wildlife research in ecophysiology or behavioral ecology) can be valuable for the field, too. During the review process, our researchers have opportunities to bring potential connections with wild animal welfare science to the authors’ attention — by nudging them to consider a wild animal perspective in an animal welfare paper, for instance, or a welfare perspective in a paper focused on another area of wildlife science.
Field-adjacent reviews like these increase awareness about wild animal welfare among researchers who aren’t already conducting direct studies of wild animal welfare. They also help us identify potential researchers who could easily expand their future research to explicitly include wild animal welfare considerations. And more generally, reviewing papers enables our staff researchers to stay up to date with the scientific landscape. This enables them to grow their knowledge base and consider how developments in related areas might be useful in wild animal welfare science, ultimately making them more effective researchers and advocates for the field.
Peer review is made possible by researchers who volunteer their time and expertise, and published papers — including our own — are collective efforts. All of the scientific papers WAI researchers publish are also subjected to a rigorous peer-review process. Most of the reviews we’ve received so far have been supportive of our work, and have constructively enriched our articles. We’re grateful to these external reviewers and journal editorial teams for their contributions to the development of the field.
