Page 50 - Becoming Metric Wise

40 Becoming Metric-Wise

three, sometimes even more reviewers. The EIC often has to search for
the needle (the really exceptional contribution) in the haystack of submis-
sions. Indeed, if a journal receives a flood of submissions it is impossible
to send all of them out for review, so the EIC does not only make a
reject-accept decision after peer review, but often before.
Nowadays many journals, including but not exclusively multidisciplin-
ary journals, have several editors besides the EIC who, largely autono-
mously, take care of (sub)domains. For this (sub)domain they have the
same authority and duties as an EIC.
It is of utmost importance for scientists’ careers and the well-being of
the journal that reviewers are chosen with care. This is one of the respon-
sibilities of the EIC. Although the EIC is the final judge, his or her deci-
sion is based on the advice of the reviewers, sometimes chosen among
the members of the editorial board.
This leads us to an aside on a journal’s editorial board. Members of
the board are usually important and frequent reviewers. It sometimes hap-
pens that they are responsible for their specialty and choose reviewers for
submissions accordingly. One of their main tasks is to attract interesting
manuscripts within the scope of the journal. Moreover, board members
can influence their journals’ receptiveness towards new topics and meth-
ods. In this way, they make sure their journal’s content follows the field’s
research front. Occasionally they may also be responsible for a “special
issue” on a timely topic. They also play a role in deciding the scope and
future direction of the journal and may help in detecting fraud and pla-
giarism. Having members of different nationalities is often considered as
an indication of the internationality of the journal itself. It must be admit-
ted, though, that often some board members are honorary members, who
have mainly been invited to increase the prestige of the journal. Yet, in a
study on editorial board members of LIS journals, Walters (2016) found
that journal citation impact is strongly correlated with board members’
research productivity.

3.1.3 The Editorial Process
Fig. 3.1, based on (Weller, 2001), provides a complete scheme of the
editorial process.
A distinction should be made between minor and major revisions.
Resubmissions of manuscripts in the minor revision category are often
handled by the EIC, who checks the revision and accepts or asks for a