Wow! I have participated in peer review and the system can work--here, it seems like the editors were lazy. I wonder how many papers a typical editor is resp

Wow! I have participated in peer review and the system can work--here, it seems like the editors were lazy. I wonder how many papers a typical editor is responsible for per day? I can understand researchers wanting to exclude groups that they are competing with. I always assumed that editors would check suggested referees against obvious conflicts of interest, but perhaps there really are too many papers and too many groups for editors to manually keep track of this these days? Perhaps some checking for recent coauthorship and institution could be performed? Ultimately, the safest way would be to simply not allow people to suggest referees. Editors should be able to find people in the field (based on the literature) who could potentially referee the paper... The basic problem is that I think there is value to having referees who are anonymous to the submitter. That way, there is no problem with someone relatively new offering a strong critique of a relatively established researcher. But someone (the editor) needs to know that the referee is competent. Also, competent refereeing takes work. For example, I refereed a "methods" paper awhile back and since the method would likely be encoded into software (and there are a lot of people that don't repeat derivations), I actually went through their integrals, checked for conceptual errors, (-) sign errors, integration errors, etc. It's community service and necessary--but it does take time.