Managing the Assault on Our Email Inbox

With the new year upon us and with many of us emerging from a short break over the holiday season, it is almost with some dread that we open the inbox of our email accounts. I was reflecting upon the sheer volume of academic-related emails, particularly with respect to invitations to submit manuscripts to journals, invitations to attend conferences and requests to review manuscripts for various journals. Clearly, there is insufficient time in the day to open each email and to read through its contents. I find screening the emails on my smartphone to be the easiest way to manage this. With the ease of being able to swipe an email to the left to delete it without opening and reading it, I am sure many of us are also doing it.

I have recently received feedback from staff who help us manage the day to day activities of the Société Internationale d’Urologie Journal (SIUJ) and the all-too-common concern about the challenges in receiving timely responses from authors and reviewers was mentioned. I provided reassurance that there was no intent to ignore these legitimate email attempts to reach out to individual urologists but that it was commonly the case of clinicians being stretched in so many directions that every additional email received is that additional micro-pressure on their daily work life. With that said, we have some strategies to improve the individual lines of communication with urologists that we will implement during this year, and I am confident that this will be effective. Watch this space and, particularly, any emails with SIUJ in the header.

I also took the opportunity to review my practice of managing these emails to help understand this space a little better. I decided, at least for the short term, to make a greater effort to think longer before swiping left. With this exercise, it became clear that not all these emails were from predatory or pseudo journals and conference organisers. Whilst the numbers of emails were significant, I can only imagine how many more never made it into my inbox, having been captured by the spam filters. I have also set up email rules that automatically send the most egregious of spammers to the junk folder. The use of email rules or blocking senders probably only has a short-term benefit given that we will never keep up with the ever-changing email addresses, email headers and email contents despite being from the same source. To my surprise, almost as many of the emails received are from legitimate and established publishers, including Taylor and Francis, Elsevier and Wiley, just to name a few. The content of these emails included calls for manuscripts, tables of contents as well as the marketing of add-on services such as those to tidy up manuscripts, open access publication and educational opportunities to assist with publishing. And this is without having even looked at the business of conferences. The email onslaught appears to be as much from legitimate and established players as is the case from predatory and pseudo players.

As a fledgling journal, we need to balance the art of being noticed as well as providing sufficient communication at a volume that will not be interpretated as yet another assault on the email inboxes of our audience. Your support of our journal as members of the SIU is deeply appreciated and I hope that our readership will apply that additional microsecond of time to see “SIUJ” in the email header as a reason to open it for further assessment.