Category: Academic Posts

  • All Journals Can, and Should, Provide Decision Letters and Reviewer Reports to Referees

    All Journals Can, and Should, Provide Decision Letters and Reviewer Reports to Referees

    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.

    • It’s the courteous thing to do. Referees invest time and energy into providing feedback; they should know whether and how that feedback mattered to the editorial decision.
    • Knowing how seriously the editors took the referee reports is an important part of the general good of editorial transparency. If the editors want to overrule one or more reviewers, that’s within their rights. But it’s inappropriate to obscure that choice from referees.
    • The field doesn’t invest a lot of time and energy into training people how to be good peer reviewers. Seeing what the editors did with your report, and how other referees assessed the same manuscript, is an important way for scholars to learn how to be better reviewers.
    • Knowing the contents of the editorial decision and the other reports becomes particularly crucial in the context of evaluating a revised and resubmitted paper. Some journals will provide these materials only in the context of an R&R, which is better than not providing them at all – but it’s still inadequate.

    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 Decision Letter, Part II

    The Decision Letter, Part II

    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.

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  • The Decision Letter, Part I

    The Decision Letter, Part I

    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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  • Reflections on Journal Editing: Caveats

    Reflections on Journal Editing: Caveats

    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.