It's the Annual Report -- Just in Time for the Winter Conference!

Stats, Figures, and On-Time Trains

Hi folks! Spring has arrived here in St. Louis and the flowers are blooming, so the idea of going to a winter conference right now seems strange. But we are so excited for the return of the Organization Science Winter Conference after a long COVID-induced hiatus. This year’s conference will be in Zurich, and there’s a lot in store. As always, the winter conference is relatively small, even though we expanded it this year to accommodate the huge interest in attending. But this year’s conference brings some new things: a doctoral workshop, a European location, an urban setting, and lots and lots of trains. For those of you coming from Milan (Bocconi and Politecnico), we’ve reserved train cars 5-8 to accommodate you all. We’ve put a lot of effort into making this year’s conference as financially and geographically inclusive as possible, within the bounds of our intimate size. Stefano and his local team worked some sort of magic to pull this off. When you see him, buy him a beer. I’ll be hovering nearby to try to mooch one off you too.

This year’s conference theme, which has been patiently waiting five years to realize its program, focuses on organizing in an age of uncertainty with diverse interests, preferences, and cognitions, as well as a plurality of identities, coalitions, goals, vocabularies, and logics. Our committee of Stefano, Vibha, John, and Violina has put tremendous effort into building a rich program that fits this theme, and I’m grateful for their leadership. We’ll begin planning for the 2025 conference immediately afterward with a new theme, committee, and location. Stay tuned!

The 2024 Annual Report

I’ve been quite slow getting things out to all of you for the past couple of months, primarily due to my incredible skill at acquiring rare respiratory infections. I’ve been recovering for the last six weeks, but am still getting up to speed. If you see me coughing a bit (or a lot) at the conference, I absolutely promise I’m not contagious. It just takes my lungs a long time to recover. So if I owe you something, I’m in a sprint to catch up on everything.

One of the first things I tried to finish was our annual report, despite my coding deficiencies and various random date formats that Manuscript Central exports. I wanted to share publicly what we’ve accomplished in the first year, so much of which is from the great team of editors and reviewers we have. There are a number of other things I would have liked to accomplish that we’ll push forward aggressively in 2024. But here is what last year looked like.

Submissions

Our 2023 submission totals were pretty similar to the previous few years, as were our accepted paper counts (except for the weird COVID year). Importantly, our backlog of accepted papers not yet in an issue is down to about 7 months. This goes up and down between issues, but it’s a major improvement and almost down to our target amount.

Inventory Backlog

Reducing the number of papers awaiting decision has been a key focus of mine, since I still have nightmares about the Boeing lean manufacturing gurus yelling at me for having full Kanban carts in my production line. When we took over in January 2023 our inventory was 306 papers, which by January 2024 was down to 175 despite similar submissions. And even this is above our steady state, since January reflects papers that came in just before and after the break, as well as the post-AOM deadline rush. But I’m happy to say that the average time since submission for our inventory is 38 days. Just as importantly, we’ve cut the right tail down. As of January 30, we had only 16 papers past 90 days, of which 5 were between 120 and 150. Here’s what that looks like using my new peach color theme.

Time Under Review

Our editors kicked butt on getting papers back to you quickly. Our average time to return papers with reviews was 74 days. Here’s what the distribution looked like based on the year of submission.

This was consistently improved across rounds. One of our goals moving forward is to reduce the number of rounds before final acceptance, but this certainly also depends on our authors. Those reductions won’t show up for a little while, but we already have a few papers submitted in 2023 that have been fully accepted. Here is our time in review by paper round (0 is the initial submission). Much of the later round reductions are because we’re not sending those papers out to reviewers again. Everyone gets cranky by Round 4. We all need less crankiness.

Finally, I’ll note that we returned at least three reviews for over 92% of papers that went out for review. The other 7.9% had two. So we’re getting more reviews back faster. I’ve found our reviewer pool, which includes our ERB, to be both generous and insightful, and we’ve worked to try to limit total reviews for any given person. One focus for us in 2024 will be providing lots of detailed reviewer guidance: not as rules, but as resources.

Decision Breakdown

Decision statistics are a little tricky to present. The commonly used stat—acceptance rate—reflects papers that are rejected at any stage and also measures those papers that reach the end of the rainbow in a given year. So our 2023 “acceptance rate” really reflects a lot of decisions from prior years. So I try to focus on the “rejection rate”, which I know is bad psychology and marketing, but I think it’s more accurate. For us, the most important statistics are what happens in rounds two and three. If editors and authors are doing things right, rejections after the second round should be very low, but not the null set. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my year as EIC, it is that “qualitative papers are different” and often take more time to reach fruition.

Our desk rejection rate in the first round was 47% last year. With a new team and philosophy, we’ve been trying to feel out what the “right” number is. This number may come down, but I read every decision and comes through the journal and have found the criteria to. be consistent. But really, we want to be consistent with all papers in a way that gives rich information for editors to make decisions while not overly taxing reviewers. Our key principle has been to return a paper quickly to authors if we see no path forward. Oftentimes, that involves having two editors look at it. Having been desk-rejected twice in the last two years, I know it is not fun, but I feel it’s my responsibility to ensure that papers with a potential path forward can get feedback from an editor and three reviewers who can spend serious time with the manuscript since they are not overwhelmed with volume. It’s also important to get those that don’t back to the authors quickly so they can send elsewhere. I have no doubt that many papers that we desk reject will end up in great journals. Mine did.

For first-round papers that did go out for review, about 20% received a revision invitation, and one paper was accepted, giving us a total rejection rate of 89%. This year we eliminated the reject-and-resubmit option for a variety of reasons, but a small number of rejected papers were given the option to resubmit a new manuscript. It’s hard to compare our rejection rate with other years that had reject-and-resubmits, but I’m comfortable saying that our decision rate was very similar to the previous editorial team, and within range of our peer journals.

For second-round submissions, about 75% received revision requests or were accepted. This number still includes papers originally submitted before our editorial team began, and thus some editors emeritus. Or maybe “emeriti”. I still struggle with the plural of those tasty eight-armed sea creatures. We did not have Latin or Greek classes where I grew up. But we did have animal husbandry.

Anyhoo. . . I expect the rejection rate for second-round submissions to come down slightly in 2024. Where we are seeing bigger differences is in Round 3, where over 80% received an accept, provisional accept, or minor revision. Only 8% were rejected. For Round 4 and later. . . only one paper was rejected, and there were a lot of late-round papers from previous years that we were trying to move to a final decision. I’m extremely happy to see where we’re at with this now.

Outreach and Impact

This category is a major initiative for us, but one that will pay off after some time in terms of impact. 1,240 of you are receiving our Substack newsletter, generating total revenue of $0.00. This is why we are not a marketing journal, I guess. As you can see below, Sharique and I are paying customers in the spirit of patronizing your kid’s lemonade stand. But just as importantly, our engagement rate is really high, with all posts at 60-70%. So thank you for reading what we send. We want to get our subscriber totals far higher than this so more people can hear about what’s happening with the journal and your papers. This year, we’ll bring some different perspectives to Substack to better represent the community and reduce the amount of time we spend on Midjourney creating images that insult the legacy of 19th-century painters. We’ll also start producing video content which I promise won’t include my cat Butterburger. Well. . . sort of promise. Here he is feeling deep satisfaction after accepting your paper. Oh wait. . . he’s a cat. So it must have been a rejection if he’s happy.

But, seriously, we want to use Substack’s new video capabilities to give voice to authors, editors, and others. Please encourage your friends and colleagues to sign up.

As we discussed before, our Impact Factor dropped last year by 21%, like many of our peers. The 2022 Impact Factor, released last year, reflects citations in 2022 to papers with publication dates of 2021 and 2020. I summoned up what little remaining math skills I had and dove deep into the numbers. What I can promise you is that this drop was purely mechanical in a way that didn’t hurt many other journals. We adopted the new Clarivate formula a year later, and so last year, our “citeable” papers were far younger than any other journals. We are expecting a natural bump in 2023, but are also working hard to substantively raise these numbers. The team of editors under Gautam left us some really great papers in the pipeline, and I love the mix of papers we’re seeing submitted now. Impact Factor is just a metric, but it is definitely a KPI and one that people care about. We publish great work. We want to make sure it gets read and cited.

Key Plans for 2024 and Beyond

We accomplished some great things in 2023, and I’m proud of the team for what they did. I hope all authors will see that if they submit to Organization Science, they will not be facing long wait times and late-round rejections. I hope all reviewers will also know that they will not be slogging through five rounds of reviews when they take on a paper. We want high-quality feedback in fewer reviews.

I’ll be talking about some of the 2024 initiatives in the coming weeks, but there are a few things that we are already pushing hard on. We’ve built an awesome (I am so Gen X) analytics team that is developing and using large language models to understand how to better improve equity in the review process, among other things. We’re building guides to help authors, editors, and reviewers, which we see as particularly important for broader inclusion. I’m also committed to introducing a data and replicability policy, as some of our peer journals are doing. These are hard to get right but are crucial to address in a way that improves evidential value while fairly acknowledging differences across methods.

Finally, we’ll continue expanding our global outreach, which is fully underway in the Asia Pacific region (thanks, Yun!).