[AISWorld] Journal Reveiw Cycle Times/response and expansion

[Thomas Stafford (tstaffor)]

ACM Senior Member Manuel Mora recently posted in these pages a heartfelt lament on the perceived extensive time to acceptance for juried manuscripts in our field, commenting about, "... the damage that we cause in our discipline for an excessive review period on an average of 8 to 18 months, where in other disciplines, the submission-review-acceptance/rejection cycle is about 2-3 months."  

As an Editor for one of the prominent business publications I respond to his posting not to critique nor refute, but to sympathize. 

I face the same issue each day: the time it takes to intake, assign, jury, and decide the fate of important scholarly research is surprisingly long, given the superb planning, excellent intentions and tireless service of the numerous parties involved in running a journal. We have good people, working hard; why does the outcome seem so slow to arrive? 

My own journal is operationally sensitive to cycle time, it being at the historical core of our traditional expertise in operations and channels (though I hasten to add, we welcome a broad and interdisciplinary body of researcher under our new strategic vision).

Yet, despite an inherent operational expertise even the best planning runs into the cycle time corollary to Murphy's Law: work expands to fill the available time. 

I do not mean to make light of the review cycle time issue. I have been thinking hard about it lately, while wondering why my editorial work has also been expanding to fill my available time :-)

What I have realized is this: the compensation for doing review work is vague and intrinsic. I have the clear sense that editorial service is not widely prized for tenure and promotion purposes in comparison to the superb value that is put upon accepted publications in top tier journals. 

And that, really, is the issue. Those who review do it for the love of science, since pragmatically speaking it is not work likely to figure prominently in gaining tenure or rank, while those who submit work to these vaguely rewarded editors and reviewers absolutely need it for career advancement and success, and need it as soon as possible. 

You see the conundrum I hope: the need for quickly accepted articles is orders of magnitude greater than the compensation and motivation to do lots of reviewing or editing. 

I don't know that there is a solution that meets each of these diametrically opposed needs/motives. And it is important to remember a few cheeky business maxims when tempted to be disgruntled at the speed with which your paper is handled at a major journal. 

First; you get what you pay for. 

The fastest review cycles I know of are at the A+ Finance journals. There, authors pay a hefty submission fee when they send in a paper, and pay another submission fee when they return a revision, too. But, you get results in a few weeks instead of a few months. And, guess what? The reviewers get paid. 

Second; every person wants three things in any business situation. They want it fast, they want it cheap, and they want it good. But, they only get to have 2 out of those three. The question is: are you willing to sacrifice quality for speed, or for price? 

Well, since our custom hereabouts is generally not to charge submission fees, but at the same time to definitely expect good review work when we submit our papers, the 2 out of 3 tradeoff in our field generally eschews speed in favor of having good reviews for free, I'm thinking. 

That is my view from the Editor's suite. I don't get paid either, by the way. 

And my Senior Editors and Associate Editors, and the reviewers they assign? Working for free, as well. In fact, the best of them (and who would not want the best handling their paper?) are doing that free work for more than 1 important journal, and so they are working very hard indeed...for free. 

I'm not sure what the answer is to the points Prof. Mora raises about the inexpeditious review process in our field, but that does not stop me from thinking about it. All editors do; after all, the most frequent question we get is "how long will it take?"

Fast, cheap or good; pick any two. 

Humbly, 

Tom Stafford,
Editor, Decision Sciences


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Thomas F. Stafford, Ph.D.
Editor, Decision Sciences Journal
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN  38152
DeSciEditor at gmail.com
tstaffor at memphis.edu

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