ZbMATH and conflict of interest

ZbMath is like Math Reviews in concept. It publishes summaries of already published articles, to help those perusing the literature to find articles of interest. These summaries are, generally speaking, not evaluative, rather informative (in some cases the published reviews are simply quotations from the article's abstract) and they are signed. Since there is no evaluation, there is not much likelihood of conflict of interest. A reviewer could downplay an important paper by writing a short succinct review, or exaggerate the importance of a minor paper by writing a long review, and one perhaps occasionally encounters things like this, but neither really does much damage, except perhaps to deflate or inflate an ego.

I posed the question to the editorial staff at zbMATH and got the following response:

We think that being employed at the same institution as one of the authors is not per se an instance of conflict of interest for a reviewer. However, if you personally feel uncomfortable with reviewing the particular paper assigned to you, just let us know, and we'll ask another reviewer.