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The editor's secrets.

Article Excerpt
This editorial provides an overview of the editorial process at one peer-reviewed publication. The editorial starts by explaining the role of the players (the editors, the review team, the area editor). The editorial then covers each step in the review process, from how reviewers are selected to how authors should respond to different outcomes. The editorial ends by discussing citation metrics, appointments to the editorial board and copyrights. This article argues that (1) requesting more reviews yields a faster, more informative review process; (2) publishing more articles can raise citations per article; (3) for many submissions, some reviewers should evaluate procedures, whereas others should evaluate contribution; (4) reviewers should not micromanage revisions; (5) editors must, unfortunately, write overly cautious decision letters; and (6) it is important to reward reviewers with board appointments and published acknowledgments. Journals must be author-friendly to survive.

Key words: marketing science; electronic journals; print journals; citations; peer review; referees; research streams; the review process

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The Major Challenges Facing Scholarly Journals

An unsettling number of great discoveries have never been published in scholarly journals or were initially rejected. This outcome should be the biggest fear of the editor in chief (EIC).

Mathematician Albert W. Tucker's famous prisoner's dilemma game (Tucker 1950) went unpublished in an academic journal until recently (Tucker 1983). The marketing mix first appeared in a presidential address to the American Marketing Association (Shugan 2004). One of the goundbreaking articles on brand loyalty appeared in a magazine (Brown 1952). Many of the original concepts of customer lifetime value were developed at credit card companies and appeared only in magazines. McFadden's often cited justification for logit models appeared in a book chapter (McFadden 1974). Staelin (1998) cites the Gans and Shepherd (1994) study, which reveals that many extremely influential economics articles were repeatedly rejected by economics journals. Numerous other studies (e.g., Armstrong 1979, Peters and Ceci 1982, Azbel 1993, Daniel 1993) have come to similar conclusions. Shepherd (1995) reports Sharpe's account that when his famous capital asset pricing model (now with over 2,000 citations) was rejected by the Journal of Finance, the editor told Sharpe that his "'assumption that all investors made the same predictions was so preposterous that it makes his conclusions uninteresting.'" Nobel Laureate Akerlof's seminal paper on the market for lemons was rejected by the American Economic Review, which replied that "AER did not publish such trivial stuff." The Journal of Political Economy rejected the paper because "the paper was too general to be true." The Review of Economic Studies rejected it because, again, "it was too trivial." See Shugan (2002) for still more examples.

Hence, scholarly journals make mistakes, and these mistakes have consequences (Starbuck 2005). Moreover, mistakes will persist unless we learn, and learning requires feedback. Reviewers, who are part of larger review teams, can sometimes learn from companion reviews. Area editors (AE) could learn from compiling and analyzing the final outcomes of their past decisions. The EIC can learn, but sadly that learning often comes long after the EIC's term, if at all.

We must wonder whether every EIC looks back over the past 10 years and contemplates past mistakes. In retrospect, why were manuscripts rejected that should have been published? Why were manuscripts published that were either wrong or irrelevant? More importantly, how do we improve the peer-review process? Perhaps the invention of the World Wide Web and the rapid dissemination of information will mitigate mistakes by scholarly journals. However, we still need better metrics to perpetually improve the peer-review process. Moreover, scholarly journals might need a new business model to survive (Shugan 2003).

Finally, editors seldom document what they have learned and their ideas for producing better outcomes. Although the following editorial probably provides few solutions for all of the preceding problems, it might provide some useful ideas, allow some institutional learning, and reveal some hidden parts of the peer-review process.

What Do Editors Do?

Substantial mystery surrounds the process of reviewing at scholarly journals (Hamermesh 1994). Some authors believe that the job of the editor-in-chief (EIC) is to reject all but the very best manuscripts. This belief is inaccurate. For scholarly journals, the EIC relies on the peer-review system to determine manuscript quality (Shugan 2006). When the EIC accepts manuscripts based solely on his or her own tastes, the publication is no longer a scholarly journal--it becomes Time magazine. Obviously, EIC tastes do matter (Medoff 2003), but tastes only influence marginal cases when peer review produces mixed recommendations.

The EIC's primary job is ensuring the journal's on-time publication. To accomplish that job, the EIC must ensure a sufficient number of submitted manuscripts, keep the duration of the peer-review process sufficiently brief, and ensure some manuscripts survive the process. Moreover, a good EIC wants the published articles to impact both future research and application. Hence, the goals...

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