Page 49 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Publishing in Scientific Journals

There are many different forms of peer review for journal submis-
sions. Aspects to consider are postpublication or prepublication review?
Who acts as peers? How many colleagues review one article? Possible
answers to some of these questions are discussed further on.

3.1.2 The Editor-In-Chief and the Editorial Board

Each scientific journal has an Editor-in-Chief (EIC), sometimes also
referred to as the main editor. Their main duties are:
• Handling peer review; possibly by sending submissions to section edi-
tors or sending directly to reviewers or referees.
• Rejecting submissions that are plagiarized, ghost-written, published
elsewhere, or of little interest to readers i.e., do not fall within the
scope of the journal.
• Contributing editorial pieces.
• Motivating and developing the editorial board and editorial staff.
• Ensuring final drafts are complete.
• Handling reader complaints and, if necessary, taking responsibility for
issues after publication.
Depending on the contract with the publisher, the EIC’s duties
may also include the following points:
• Cross-checking citations in text and examining references (although
this is mainly the authors’ responsibility).
• Cross-checking facts, spelling, grammar, writing style, page design,
tables, figures and photos.
• Editing content and lay-out.
It may happen that the last aspect is handled by the publisher’s office.
Nowadays many of these points, including the act of submission are
facilitated by an electronic editorial submission system. Such a system offers
a whole range of facilities to authors, reviewers, and editors, smoothing the
flow of editorial and submission handling. It includes templates for different
types of letters, automatic e-mail forwarding, and so on.
In the large majority of cases, a manuscript is submitted to a journal
where an editor takes charge of it. On the one hand, he or she may reject
it immediately, typically because he or she judges the article to be out of
scope, or because of linguistic reasons, such as incomprehensibility. On
the other hand, the EIC may also accept some manuscripts without exter-
nal reviewing, for instance, in the case of a well-known colleague being
invited to write a contribution. Otherwise, the editor assigns one, two,