Discussion and debate concerning Eric Rittinger (2017), “Arming the Other: American Small Wars, Local Proxies, and the Social Construction of the Principal-Agent Problem” International Studies Quarterly 61(2): 396-409.
Contributors: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Tarak Barkawi, Srdjan Vucetic, Alexandra Gheciu, and Eric Rittinger.
Discussion and debate concerning Matthew Fuhrmann and Yonatan Lupu (2016), “Do Arms Control Treaties Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty” International Studies Quarterly 60(3): 530–539.
Contributors: Scott Wolford, Rupal N. Mehta, Alexandre Debs, Matthew Fuhrmann, and Yonatan Lupu.
Discussion and debate concerning J. Furman Daniel III and Paul Musgrave (2017), “Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture Matters for Images of International Relations” International Studies Quarterly 61(3): 269–283.
Contributors: Meera Sabaratnam, Valerie M. Hudson, Jutta Weldes, Kathleen P.J. Brennan, David Sylvan, Vineet Thakur, J. Furman Daniel, III, and Paul Musgrave.
Discussion and debate concerning Henry Farrell and John Quiggin (2017), “Consensus, Dissensus, and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism” International Studies Quarterly 61(2): 269–283.
Contributors: Abraham Newman, Andrew Baker, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Paul Krugman, Stephen K. Nelson, Henry Farrell, and John Quiggin.
I won’t knowingly review for a journal that doesn’t, as a matter of policy, share anonymized copies of decision letters and reviewer reports with referees.
Once a journal makes a decision and I don’t receive these materials, I usually check to make sure that mistakes weren’t made – that I didn’t accidentally delete the notification or whatever. If there wasn’t a mistake, and the journal confirms that it doesn’t provide referees with the decision letter and other reports, then I’m done. I let the journal know that I won’t review for them again unless and until it changes its policy.
And I do mean “policy.” It’s not enough for the journal to share this material only when prodded.
Why do I feel so strongly about this? There are a number of reasons why, in my opinion, journals are obligated to provide referees with decision letters and reports.
I feel so strongly about this that I occasionally make public appeals to other academics to boycott journals that don’t engage in this best practice when it comes to transparency. I made one such call on Facebook and Twitter within the last few days – about the same time that I emailed a journal that hadn’t sent me a decision letter for a manuscript that I’d reviewed. Both an exchange with another former editor and with that journal highlighted something that hadn’t ocurred to me. It isn’t always a matter of not wanting to provide these materials, but not knowing how to do so.
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The basic principles that should guide letters and their RFDs hold across every kind of decisions. However, we need to recognize important differences between, say, a rejection and an R&R. In this post, I lay out my thoughts about letters for the types of decisions that we made at ISQ. Not all journals use the same categories or mean the same thing. For instance, a (rare) “reject and resubmit” at ISQ meant that we would consider a revised version of the paper as an entirely new submission; at some journals, a “reject and resubmit” is equivalent to “major revisions” R&R.
(more…)For caveats and background, see my introductory post.
Editors write a lot of decision letters. At high-volume journals, editors write so many decision letters that it can become a tedious grind. For authors, though, the information communicated in decision letters matters enormously. It can affect their job prospects, salaries, and chances of advancement. Of course, authors, especially in the moment, overestimate the significance of any single journal decision. But receiving a rejection, revise-and-resubmit invitation, or an acceptance can certainly feel, in the moment, like a defining event. This is especially the case for graduate students and junior academics, who are less experienced in, and more vulnerable to, the vagaries of the review process.
This makes decision letters are the single most consequential way that editors communicate with authors. The same is true for referees. We don’t spend a lot of time teaching academics how to craft referees reports. There is, at best, limited consensus about what makes for a good review. So decision letters also become an important way to send cues to referees about the quality of their reports.
If you think about it, all of this places a heavy burden on editors. That burden only seems heavier when we consider how arbitrary and capricious the peer-review process can be
Yeah. Okay. I’m being a bit melodramatic. Editors don’t perform literal surgery. They don’t design airplanes. The stakes are what they are. But I stand by the underlying sentiment: editors have a responsibility to take decision letters very seriously.
In this post, I’ll focus on general issues. In Part II, I’ll elaborate on them in the context of the specific kinds of decision letters.
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Josh asked me if I would write a series of posts at the Duck of Minerva reflecting on my time editing International Studies Quarterly (ISQ). I agreed. And I’m cross-posting the pieces here.
This post is less a reflection that some background and caveats. I figure that by collecting them in a single post, I won’t have to junk up subsequent entires in this series. I’ll just refer back to what I’ve written here.
Background. I formally edited ISQ from 2014-2018, although my team started to handle new manuscripts in October of 2013. I headed up a very large team. At peak, it included as many as fourteen academic editors and two managing editors. So my job was as much about oversight as about handling specific submissions. I won’t bore readers with a long discussion of process. You can read about our procedures in our annual reports.
ISQ is the “flagship” journal of the International Studies Association (ISA). This matters for three reasons.
First, “association journals” (such as ISQ) are answerable to external leadership. Their editors depend on the explicit or tacit support of that leadership when it comes to journal policy. Some policies are mandated by the association.
Second, association journals have a duty to the various constituencies of their parent organization. In principle, ISQ should be open to any of the kind of work produced by ISA’s intellectually and geographically diverse membership. It therefore has a responsibility to represent different methods, theoretical frameworks, and substantive areas of research.
Third, although ISQ has middling rankings in some indices—such as the infamous “Impact Factor”—it scores well on subjective rankings of prestige and enjoys significant visibility.
The combination of ISQ‘s relative pluralism and its visibility mean that, as far as I know, it receives more submissions than any other peer-reviewed journal in international studies. But it also has a lot of space, so while it received 650+ submissions in my final year as lead editor, our acceptance rates hovered around 10-12%.
Some Caveats. My observations about the peer-review process and journal publishing are based on a single journal in a single field. They also come from a discrete slice of time. Overall submissions at international-studies journals continue to increase. The field continues to globalize. Expectations for scholarly publishing continue to evolve. All of this means that while some of my views may remain relevant for years, others are likely to become quickly outdated.
In my next post, I’ll start talking substance.
I have a new article about progressive foreign policy up at Foreign Affairs. An excerpt:
During the 2016 primary and general election, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton often appeared to represent a Democratic foreign policy establishment whose views might have been ripped from 2003, when the United States could still claim to be, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation”; and a number of luminaries released a blueprint for “progressive internationalism” that staked out a position between the “neo-imperialist right” and the “non-interventionist left.” Clinton, of course, voted for the 2003 Iraq War and supported the 2011 intervention in Libya. But her primary challenger from the left, Senator Bernie Sanders, delayed articulating such an alternative foreign policy agenda until his 2017 speech at Westminster College.
All of this is particularly unfortunate. The new gilded age—of corporate power, concentrated wealth, environmental dangers, corruption—demands a strong progressive movement. But that movement also faces challenges reminiscent of the era of New Deal liberalism: a rising tide of right-wing extremism, post-fascism, and neofascism, at home and abroad. These threats are simultaneously national and transnational in character. Their solutions require a combination of domestic and multilateral efforts, none of which will be possible without U.S. leadership harnessed to progressive goals. Abandoning the infrastructure of U.S. international influence because of its many misuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for decades to come.
We produced supplemental content for International Studies Quarterly in the form of online symposia. We used to do this at a site hosted by the International Studies Association, which owns the journal.
About a year ago, ISA discontinued support for the site in anticipation of transitioning to a “common portal” at Oxford University Press. So we are hosting our symposia at ISQ‘s Dataverse page. We then publicize them via Twitter, Facebook, and OUP.
However, downloading symposium from Dataverse is a bit cumbersome, as it requires a multi-stage process. So I’ve decided to also host them here. I’ll mirror new symposia at a dedicated page and, eventually, fill in the back catalog. I just uploaded up our new symposium, put together by Abe Newman, on Henry Farrell’s and John Quiggin’s account of the rise and fall of Keynesian responses to the Great Recession of 2008.
Abe secured a great group of contributors, so you should check it out.