Editorial Incentives & Early-Stage Determinants of Submission Impact

Abstract

"Despite ongoing interest in the role of journals and citation impact on innovation landscapes, the editorial process itself is poorly understood due to privacy concerns and a lack of data; accordingly, there is also a limited understanding of what data should ideally be collected. Through semantic and econometric analysis of editorial databases from five journals covering 2004-2010, including access to paper submissions, revisions, referee reviews, and editorial and referee decisions, I study the early-stage determinants of editorial and referee decisions as well as the information content of referee review. The results both help understand review processes at these journals and identify critical data points that scientific commons could collect and publicize via mechanisms that respect privacy of both authors and referees."