Dear Colleagues -
As we strive to review less (2 reviewers and 2 rounds of reviews), the journal of M&SOM is making good progress in 2015. (Please click on the hyperlink for more details.) As of end of February 2016, our median cycle time is 39 days (average) and 58 days (median).
To progress more, we strive to encourage reviewers to provide more constructive comments for the editorial board members to make informed decisions faster. To do so, the editorial board developed more specific review guidelines and a template for the reviewers in December 2015.
By early March 2016, we are delighted to note that over 50% of our reviewers are using the new template. More importantly, we noticed that reviewers who used our new template tend to provide with fewer and yet more constructive improvement suggestions that can be very useful because:
- It can help the AE and DE to synthesize the reviewers’ comments more easily and to develop a clear path for the authors to revise their papers. (For example, if each reviewer offers 3 major improvement suggestions, then the AE / SE can focus on 6 suggestions instead of 40-50 comments.) This will reduce the AE’s and the DE’s review cycle time. (We all know a laundry list of all possible improvements is not helpful because there are no perfect papers, and perfection is not the bar for publication. Our goal is to publish papers that ask and rigorously answer interesting and relevant questions.)
- It can help the authors to focus on a few major issues that they need to address instead of dealing with a laundry list. This will shorten their revision cycle time and help them to provide a more precise response (instead of lengthy one) and improve the flow of the paper. In some cases, the “response to reviewers” was longer than the paper, and the key message of the revised paper was buried with many extensions, side issues, etc. (We think the authors should discussed these extension in the main papers and move various non-critical extensions to an online appendix.)
- It can help the review team to reduce the review cycle time as the authors response is more concise.
Ultimately, if we can encourage our reviewers to adopt our template or at least focus on providing fewer improvement suggestions, everybody wins!
Let us continue to review less and progress more. Thank you!
Opher Baron & Christopher Tang
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Christopher Tang
Professor
University of California-Los Angeles
Los Angeles CA
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