I am very proud of this achievement and I am thinking about sharing the email to social media. Is it okay to post it as long as I remove confidential information, e.g. manuscript id, title, author?
Also, if it is okay to post it on social media, can I include the journal name and the editor that sent the email?
Congrats! I wish more people would be excited about being a reviewer.
Personally, I would only say the journal's name (e.g., TheAwesomeJournal). For example:
Yay! Just got invited to be a reviewer for the first time @TheAwesomeJournal
I would not name the editor because not all journals have public editors for specific articles.
Edit: I would be okay with listing the journal's name because some resources like ORCID and Publons will list journals you have reviewed for.
Edit number 2: I would not include the email from the editor. Socially, this would be weird for scientists and practically, it makes it likely you might accidentally include identifying information about the review.
Please do not share the email, that would be unprofessional.
Many journals take great care in deciding what information about their internal operations to make public, and which details to keep private and share only with reviewers and other people involved with decision making. By sharing the email you may inadvertently expose such details.
In general, it seems like a bad habit and in poor taste to take an email that someone sent you as a professional communication, and publicize it on social media, even with details redacted. Perhaps in this situation this will be mostly harmless, but I cannot help but feel that this will be less well-received by your social media followers than you may be imagining.
No you should not share the email although it would probably not do too much harm if enough details are removed. It is best not to share the journal name either.
A review is anonymous and should stay that way [*]. The academic world is smaller than you may think: someone who knows the name of the journal, date and your field of research may be able to deduce who the reviewer is. Note that your field of research is probably publicly known or can be deduced from the journal name. The date of posting to social media, combined with the fact that many of your social media connections are probably scientists does not help either.
I would suggest the following:
[*] Personally, I would prefer authors to be anonymous and require reviewers to disclose their name, but that is my opinion and not how the review system currently works.
If I were the editor and you posted my email, with or without my name, without my permission, that would be the last time I would ever have any kind of professional contact with you. I would be furious!
I would consider you untrustworthy and unprofessional if I found out that you have been sharing an email I sent you with even a limited number of your peers, but if you actually go as far as to announce it to everyone on social media, you would have burned all your bridges with me. I would never, ever want to work with you again under any circumstances.
Now, I may be a bit on the extreme end here, I know. I dislike social media so this feels particularly egregious to me. However, at its core, this is a case where you are taking confidential communication and blithely sharing it with the whole world! I can't imagine anyone would be OK with that. If you're willing to do this, how can I trust you not to share the information from the paper? How can I trust that you will respect the confidentiality of the review process? How can I trust you, period?
I get that you're excited to receive your first review invitation, I was too! And I shared the fact that I had been asked to review a paper with my friends. I did not share a confidential email though! So go ahead and share the fact that you have been asked to review. This is an important milestone and you should absolutely be proud of it! But don't ruin it by sharing the email, or anything else that can be used to guess who the reviewer of a paper may have been.
If you share the email, the best case scenario is that you will be perceived as immature and childish, and the worst case scenario is that you will be seen as someone who cannot be trusted.
As others have said, do not include anything other than the journal's name.
But if I may offer a - perhaps somewhat controversial - opinion, depending on your field and personality: It's okay and even expected to list this on your resume and platforms like Publons. However, I personally would refrain from posting this on social media. Being a reviewer is a fairly common and standard thing to do as part of your job. Being overly excited about this in public could make you look like a newbie in some people's eyes (which you probably are ;-) ), and you will have to decide whether that hurts your reputation more than it helps. Like a teacher going "Wohoo, look at me, I have just graded my first homework! Aren't I great!" Yes, it is an achievement, but one that is expected in your line of work. I personally appreciate a little humility and understatement in academia, and I ain't no old seasoned academic either. But that's just my five cents...
Also, keep in mind that announcing this around the time you actually do the review, it might telegraph to the authors who you are, especially if this is a smaller, more specialized journal. There are a few people who might retaliate if they don't like your peer review, either by shutting down one of your papers in the future or interfering with your career, especially if they are more established than you. It is not too common, but more common than one might expect among supposedly rational and objective folk.
A possible way of understanding better whether this is something to tweet about, and in which way you might want to do that, is to try to twitter search function, to see if other people post about this, and if yes, in which way.
With a quick search, I found someone posting that thay got invited to review a paper on field X, and they are proud that they are being considered an expert on X by the editor. But I did not find anyone tweeting either about the journal or even sharing more things about the review request.
The journal would know better than random people on the internet what they're comfortable being shared. Send them an email saying that you'd like to share this on social media, and ask them what details they consider confidential and what they're comfortable being public knowledge.
