It is completely normal your supervisor to delegate a review to you. But it is not normal to use it as their own review when submitting to the editor. This is of course plagiarism.

"Me and my colleagues are getting peer reviewing tasks multiple times a year from our senior researcher, who always complains he doesn't have the time for it." The real answer to your question is: tell the senior researcher you need time to write your own papers.

@EarlGrey Well, we are applied sciences institute so we do a lot of industrial projects (we also do acquisition, PM etc.). The senior researcher doesn't see eye to eye with not doing his research thing because of an industrial project. That is of course not a topic for discussion here I guess. :D

This will depend on the editor who sent the paper for review. The senior researcher can ask the editor whether he can give it to someone else.

The answer to the title question is "Yes, when done with the editor acknowledgment" I vote to close the question because the real question is "can my boss force me to do a time-consuming peer review in place of him?" and it is not clear whether he/she is just offloading the review to you without telling this to the editor.

@rbaleksandar Legal terms? Which laws do you think would be implicated? Acceptance of the review likely does not arise to a binding contract.

@rbaleksandar Do not be naive, of course it is wrong, your superior is taking your work and impersonating it as it was theirs! Please include these details in your question, i.e. that you are not the official peer reviewer, and change the question.

Are you receiving a thank you email from the journal/editor for your review? no? who do you think it is getting that?

@EarlGrey I don't recall writing that the supervisor is taking credit for it. I am talking in more general terms. Some journals may forbid this (not really experienced with submission forms really).

@Anyon Well, there should be some regulations regarding who does what. After all, even when doing voluntary work or charity, there are obligations and rules that need to be fulfilled and followed.

So if the supervisor is not taking the credit for it, who is receiving the thank you notes from the journal/editor? bonus&optional question, if applicable: who is putting this review as done in the publons database?

@EarlGrey The supervisor. We don't have access to anything. Even information on when and if the review has been submitted. Before you mentioned it here, I didn't even know that there is a "Thank you" note. :D

The reviewer can definitely recommend you to the editors as a reviewer. It is then up to the editors to follow it or not. THAT is allowed for sure.

ok, sorry if I have been blunt. Just to remove a wrong concept: you do not sign as a peer reviewer, you are asked to perform a (peer) review on an article-by-article basis. Your supervisor is probably in the "pool" (nothing more than a list of names) accessible to the editors of certain journals. But there is in general no formal agreement to be a peer-reviewer. Someone is asked to be peer reviewer of a specific paper (then this someone may write in their CV "I am peer reviewer of journal X", but it is not an official role). Sorry again if I was blunt.

@EarlGrey No need to apologize. It was misunderstanding. And yes, I do believe that our supervisor is in the so called pool and is not asked "in person" by the journal or anyone else to review a specific paper.

@rbaleksandar Sorry, you write the opposite of what I meant. Your supervisor is asked by some editor "in person" of the journal to review the papers and he is explicitly accepting the invitation. If he has 10 papers to review, it means he accepted every single invitation to review them. And he gets a thank you note for every single review he submits.

My friends and I have done many reviews for our supervisor too (We had to in order to get our degrees). Unfortunately, all the credit has been given to the supervisor. It is funny how many times he has been selected as a top referee in some journals. This is definitely a plagiarism and misuse of others.

Good question, but I would say that the first sentence should be removed. It has nothing to do with the question and may send the discussion sideways.

I took the liberty and edited it out to prevent people jumping on this part.