A Midsummer Night's Dream Report

The Organization Science Mid-Year Report

St. Louis, like the rest of the world, is extremely hot, which might explain how my mind went from Stata to Shakespeare to Chagall in a couple of hours. It could also be because I love Chagall’s depiction of lovers, even when one of them had his head turned into the head of an ass, and I deluded myself into a way to connect that side of me to the one cursing at my screen this afternoon for not revealing my inevitable coding mistakes in producing this report. Anywho. . .

Here at Organization Science we are always striving for transparency, so I wanted to share with everyone our statistics so far for 2024 as well as update the stats from 2023 submissions, since it’s hard to present review time numbers in January for papers submitted in November and December. So we have some great news to share from you both on the demand and supply sides. The partnership between our authors, reviewers, readers, and editors is producing nice results, and I’m grateful to all of you for your contributions Let’s get started.

Our impact factor is back up 20% from 4.1 (2022) to 4.9 (2023), which is in strong contrast to nearly all of our peer journals. Impact factor is not an objective, but rather one key performance indicator, so we indeed care about in its reflection of how much people are reading and citing our papers. It’s also noisy year-over-year, and can be heavily boosted by outliers and the types of papers that rack up citations (i.e., papers I didn’t write). So we’ll celebrate this as one data point and focus on underlying quality even more. I do want to note that the papers that contributed to this were all accepted before I arrived, so Gautam's team clearly left me an outstanding set of papers. When leaders take over organizations, you never know what you will inherit. I clearly inherited some awesome papers, so thanks to all of you who contributed to that. As I posted last year (when we had the biggest drop of any of our peers), here’s the latest in some of empirical management peers.

The other big news is that first round submissions are up 22% over the same period in 2023, with a 25% increase in overall submissions. We hope this reflects authors’ recognition that we’ll provide a fast and fair process, and the awareness of our outstanding team of editors with diverse knowledge and interests. Keep them coming. We have been adding new senior editors to accommodate this additional load, hopefully so I don’t end up doubling the 21 papers I’ve directly handled already this year.

We continue to return papers quickly with three (91%) or two (8%) reviews,¹ which is reflected in our inventory levels and review time distributions. There are always exceptions, but we work hard to minimize these. As you can see below, we’ve made great progress in eliminating our long right tail and our center of mass.

Papers in Inventory by Date...

Review time is also holding strong for both desk rejections and papers out for review. Please note, as always, that the most recent date (July 2024) is biased downward by slower papers being under review, but you can see that we’re staying consistent with January, 2024. The figure below is for only those papers that are not desk rejected. For desk rejections, we’re averaging 15 days. This is hardly QJE levels (i.e., 15 minutes), but maybe that’s a good thing.

First Round Submissions Over the Last Two Years

We're advancing papers toward acceptance much faster, with fewer rounds and faster acceptances, but after spending two days trying to create pretty figures of this, I decided to just get this report out first and then figure it out later. You don't want to see the code that produced these figures and stats. It's like someone told ChatGPT: "Write a Stata program to analyze Org Science performance and then change it to make it 8 time longer and 12 times less computationally efficient. Then make one of the figures peach colored."

Figures aside, I can tell you that we’ve rejected no papers past the third round this year after only one last year. And as you can see below, all these papers were getting accepted. Our acceptance rate continues to be about 8%, depending on how you calculate it.

Finally, our Substack reach continues to grow, with almost 1500 subscribers now and nearly 70% engagement. We’ll have new content creators coming soon too, so please encourage more people to subscribe. Yun Hou, our Asia-Pacific Outreach Editor, has done a fantastic job getting our WeChat up and running with over a thousand subscribers across China. We’re launching a similar outreach initiative for South Asia soon, so stay tuned.

That’s the report for tonight, and as always, please reach out if you have questions. And since I’ve gotten so many requests for more Butterburger photos,² here’s one to explain why I haven’t been able to get to those revisions I promised you.

Thanks for all you do,

Lamar

1. For the 1% of you who received four reviews, know that we only reserve that for our most special authors. I believe there’s also a level in Inferno for that.

2. It was actually just one request from Victor.