{"id":881,"date":"2020-01-09T14:10:22","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T14:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/psychology\/?p=881"},"modified":"2020-05-28T12:25:42","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T12:25:42","slug":"ten-things-i-learned-from-being-editor-of-the-british-journal-of-social-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/psychology\/2020\/01\/09\/ten-things-i-learned-from-being-editor-of-the-british-journal-of-social-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten things I learned from being editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Prof John Drury<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 31st<\/sup> December 2019) I stepped down from being editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology<\/a> (BJSP), a post I occupied for three years, shared with Hanna Zagefka (Royal Holloway University of London). The occasion has prompted me to review some of the things I learned (or views I developed) from the role. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I do that, it is worth explaining what being an\neditor entails. The following applies to BJSP but is also true of many other academic\njournals. The basic bread-and-butter job of the editor (also called \u2018chief\neditor\u2019 or \u2018editor-in-chief\u2019) is triage. This means that when submissions come\ninto the journal, the editor decides whether they should be considered further\nor rejected there and then (\u2018desk-rejection\u2019). If the editor thinks a\nsubmission merits further consideration, they forward it to one of the\njournal\u2019s associate\neditors<\/a>. These are the people that invite the reviewers. The reviewers\nmight be people listed on the journal\u2019s editorial board as \u2018editorial\nconsultants\u2019, but more likely they are anyone the associate editor regards as\nmost appropriate and willing to provide expert refereeing for the particular\nsubmission. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, if you are considering any of these roles, you might\nfind useful some of my thoughts on editing a journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Co-editing is good<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the past, a single editor-in-chief was the norm. Today,\nshared editorships are becoming more common. Sharing the editorship is helpful\nfor a number of reasons. First, you benefit from each other\u2019s experience and\njudgement. In my case, Hanna\u2019s decision-making presented solutions to numerous\ntricky problems that I struggled over. Second, and more practically, sharing\nthe load allows breaks from triage and enables holidays without a backlog\nbuilding up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Reviews are not decisions; associate editors use their\njudgement to make decisions<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Editors receiving reviews should use these reviews to make their judgements about a submission. You may be surprised to learn, however, that for some journals (not ours) the editor stands back, and exercises little of their own judgement. They treat the reviews as if speaking for themselves. This means that for a \u2018revise and resubmit\u2019 they automatically send the revision out for review again. In my view, this is sometimes a waste of time. Even where a significant revision is required, if the editor has the expertise to judge whether the author has made the necessary changes (and can determine that these changes have not adversely affected the rest of the paper), a second round of reviews is not necessary. If the editor needs the extra expertise then send it out again, but otherwise the editor\u2019s job is not to stand back but to think for him- or herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Manage your associate editors<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It follows from the point above that it is necessary to\nappoint associate editors with the range of expertise sufficient to cover the\ntypes of papers that get submitted to the journal. So you need to find out what\nkind of thing gets submitted, what kinds of topics are submitted most often,\nand who in the discipline has knowledge in that area. There is another\nconsideration, however. When I look at the lists of associate editors for some\njournals, I think either the journal doesn\u2019t have many submissions, or those\nassociate editors are burned out. At BJSP, we managed the issue of the workload\nof associate editors by appointing a large number of them, to spread the load.\nThis makes it more likely that your associate editors will get to their\nallocated submissions in time and that they will give them the care and\nattention they need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Triage is emotional labour<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Just as it\u2019s exciting to find promising and interesting\nsubmissions in the editor\u2019s inbox, there is an emotional cost to handling the\nrejections. As authors ourselves, we know the pain of a rejected paper. We know\nthe time and effort that has gone in. At BJSP, in common with many journals,\nthe desk-reject rate at triage is around 50% (and the total rejection rate\ncloser to 85%). That\u2019s a lot of disappointing news to give.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Give rejected authors something constructive <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At the triage stage, rejections occur for a variety of\nreasons. Sometimes, papers are rejected because authors are not familiar with\nthe culture of research publishing. The editor has a responsibility to help\nthese aspiring authors learn something, even if it\u2019s simple things like the\npresentation of statistics. In fact, the same is true of more experienced\nauthors who might also get rejected at this stage. It is incumbent on editors\nto include in the rejection letter something constructive that the authors can\nuse as they take their work forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. It\u2019s hard to spot top papers<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the pieces of advice I remember receiving in a\ndiscussion about improving the journal\u2019s impact factor was to identify early\nthose papers that are likely to be well-received. But this turned out to be\nmuch harder to do than you might imagine (at least for me). Quite a few of\nthose submissions that I thought would likely get a lot of interest were\nrejected by the associate editor (and sometimes even desk-rejected), and one or\ntwo of those that I thought only just scraped in were among those most highly\ncited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Think carefully about special issues<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Another piece of advice we received was about special issues. It is widely thought that these are typically highly popular and highly cited. If you are an editor considering a call for a special issue, I suggest you check the data from your journal. While for some disciplines and journals, special issues always work, for others the articles in special issues actually get fewer people reading and citing them than normal articles. The lesson here is to think carefully about the topic of the special issue. Is it one that large numbers are interested in or not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Keep an eye on the website<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the old days, of course, the triage role of the editor would be all there is, more or less. But since the journal will now have a website, and online versions which will be the principal way that readers access articles, in my view it is important to keep an eye on how the journal is being presented online. The job of managing the website will fall to the journal publishers, of course, but editors will be the best judge of content and so will have views on the prominence of content across the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. Run a social media account<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Twitter is now clearly an excellent way of raising the profile of particular articles and indeed the journal as a whole. The publisher will probably have their own Twitter account, but your name and profile can help in all promotion drives and can result in greater interest in the journal from both readers (measured in both downloads and impact factor) and authors (measured in number and quality of submissions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. Typesetting is not proof-reading<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Many journal publishers do not provide a full proof-read of the articles they publish. At all stages, associate editors and authors should be alerted to any presentational issues in their manuscript, and authors should check all drafts and proofs very carefully. Sometimes typesetters introduce new errors into a manuscript, so vigilance is required. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Prof John Drury On 31st December 2019) I stepped down from being editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology (BJSP), a post I occupied for three years, shared with Hanna Zagefka (Royal Holloway University of London). The occasion…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":156,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[98529,1],"tags":[168147,98536],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pafdEV-ed","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":186,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/psychology\/2016\/04\/18\/behavioural-genetics-for-education\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":0},"title":"Behavioural Genetics for Education","date":"April 18, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"by Darya Gaysina I am a co-editor (with Yulia Kovas and Sergei Malykh) of the book \u2018Behavioural Genetics for Education\u2019, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan last month (http:\/\/www.palgrave.com\/us\/book\/9781137437310). 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