The editorial team often wants to understand how the journal’s editors are performing. One of the most common charts that you can include is the time from editor assignment to initial decision. This chart reports the mean time for all editors as compared to previous years. From this chart, you can tell how your team, as a whole, is performing. Your editorial team may prefer to use the median values.
However, it is often beneficial to look at individual editor performance. Two key indicators are the time from editor assignment until the first reviewer is invited. Another data point that is helpful to understand is the time from when the last review was submitted until the initial decision was rendered. From these charts, you can locate pinch points in your peer review process, which lead to longer overall times for manuscripts to receive their initial decisions.
Another performance indicator concerns assessing how effective your editors are at securing reviewers for manuscripts going through peer review. You could, for instance, report out the mean (average) number of reviewers per manuscript each editor is inviting. Editors with higher numbers of reviewers per manuscript might be having trouble identifying people in the journal’s reviewer pool who would be likely to agree to review. Data may also suggest a geographic bias or limitation in the willingness of Editors to widen their personal pool of potential reviewers. However, there are confounders to this interpretation. The situation could actually reflect the fact that the subject area is especially niche with a very limited pool of reviewers. If an Editor is assigned manuscripts at a certain time of the year this may also impact performance (such as during holiday seasons). Therefore, it is best to also report the number of manuscripts assigned to each editor for the same time period, so that the number of reviewer invitations per manuscript can be better understood. If all editors have higher than expected numbers for this variable, it might indicate that your reviewer database needs cleaning or more reviewers need to be recruited.
You might consider including information on the number of unique reviewers that your editors invited for a given time period. Low numbers of unique reviewers might indicate that editors are going back to the same people over and over, which can lead to reviewer burn out. Additionally, using the same reviewers too often could cause your published content to be skewed toward the views of those few people. Again, you always need to consider the number of editor assignments for the same time period, as you would expect higher numbers of unique reviewers for editors with more assignments. If an editor only had a few assignments in the time period, you would know not to be concerned about a low number of unique reviewers. The number of unique reviewers per editor is a time intensive chart to produce, however, this chart can be easily generated in Origin Reports.
One very effective editor performance chart is the editor rejection-rate bubble chart. This particular chart not only shows each editor’s rejection rate, but it also shows the average time it takes editors to reach an initial decision and the number of assignments they had during that time period. In our next blog post, we will be discussing in more detail how to interpret this bubble chart.
