Organization Science Mid-Year Performance Report
Organization Science Mid-Year Performance Report
Fast turnaround, reduced inventory, and the path forward
When I was appointed Editor-in-Chief, I emphasized that one of the first orders of business would be to address complaints about long review processes. Most papers in the past had been handled quickly, but there were certainly many cases that weren’t, for a variety of reasons. I’d heard that many of you—particularly junior faculty and students—were reluctant to submit to Organization Science because of concerns that a long process might hurt the visibility of your work and in many cases your tenure cases or job market success.
Our strategy for addressing this issue was threefold. First, I spent months putting together the right team of editors, and it is such an outstanding team. Second, I put on my old lean manufacturing hat and redesigned the process flow to cut out additional steps and potential for inventory pileup. Finally, we all reestablished norms of responsiveness which were supported by reduced editorial workload. The success of this operations strategy depended crucially on the strength of the editorial team. I am so fortunate to have such a great set of editors.
To summarize. . . our team did an amazing job addressing the core operational issues that have hurt the journal’s reputation. We easily met our goals on review time and dramatically reduced a long right tail of outstanding papers, including many in late rounds. Here are some of the things we achieved in the first six months of our team:
First round submissions are up 8% year over year. This could be for many reasons, and we won’t read too much into this until we have a lot more data, but I report this first to emphasize that none of the metrics below are due to fewer submissions.
99% of the papers submitted in Jan/Feb were decided by June 19. 92% if you include March submissions.
For the 99% of papers from Jan/Feb, mean review time was 67 days when the paper went out for review (70 for first round). This is absolutely outstanding and over a month shorter than in 2022. Below is a comparison of the same time period in 2022 and 2023, for first-round submissions.
Here is a histogram showing how long each of these papers took to return reviews and an editorial decision
The figures that include March submissions look nearly identical.
92% of papers were returned with three or more reviews.
We reduced inventory 38% from 306 papers to 190, despite more submissions. This was a major team effort to achieve, which in many case meant going through old papers one-by-one to find procedurally fair ways to return constructive decisions. The number of papers over 120 days dropped from 32 to 2. Those over 150 days dropped from 22 to 0. There are currently no papers that have been under review for greater than 135 days
Here is the full distribution that shows the inventory reductions across time
This histogram better illustrates the right tail we focused on.
=The average days in inventory for undecided papers was cut by 38%.
Promotion and Outreach
If you are reading this, you are probably aware that we’ve worked to build a community through Substack—an endeavor spearheaded by Deputy Editor Sharique Hasan. We’ve grown to 1,010 1,022 subscribers so far, and have plans to substantially increase this moving forward. In addition, we have two paid subscribers: Sharique and Lamar! I’ve heard that buying your own books is an effective strategy for getting on the New York Times bestseller list!
Engagement is also high, which is very different from what we’ve observed on social media. Twitter has never been particularly successful for us, and given current feeds of hate and violent videos, is unlikely to be in our future. We will continue to use LinkedIn and the AOM boards, and I’m up to 25 followers on Threads! 🤣 Evidently, I’m not cool enough to get a Bluesky invitation. . .
We’ll be rapidly expanding our outreach and promotion moving forward, now that we have the operations nailed down.
Multi-dimensional Diversity: We still have a lot of work to do in improving diversity in the journal, and this will be a major point of emphasis in the next year, but we are now up to nearly 46% non-male editors and have more than tripled the number of editors outside North America. Although we have increased representation by traditionally underrepresented groups, we recognize we need to make more progress on this moving forward.
Impact Factor: Clarivate released the 2022 Impact Factor stats this month, and Organization Science has fallen from 5.2 in 2021 to 2022. This is the largest drop among our peer journals, but identifiably equivalent to others such as ASQ, OBHDP, and JAP. Congrats to SMJ for their increase!
The 2022 Impact Factor reflects 2022 citations to 2020 and 2021 papers, which is obviously entirely beyond the current team’s control, but it is clear that this is an important project that will take several years to see performance improvements. It’s important to note that Clarivate keeps changing their calculations, so some of this decrease is purely mechanical. We had twice as many 2021 citable pubs as 2020, making our pool of papers younger. We also note that Impact Factor is one metric, and only partially reflects impact of articles. In a couple of weeks I will dedicate a post exclusively to Impact Factor and what it does and doesn’t reflect. We’re hopefully bringing on an Analytics Editor in the next few weeks, and this is one of the key areas of analysis. In evaluating the data, however, it is clear to me that there is substance behind our lower IF, and I have no doubt that we will be able to substantially increase this in the future.
Summary and Moving Forward: This is an amazing effort and success by the entire team of editors, review board members, and other ad hoc reviewers. I am deeply grateful for everyone’s efforts. I hope that authors everywhere can view this progress and feel confident that any paper they submit will be returned quickly and with a fair and productive process. We cannot track progress yet on revisions, but we are also dedicated to reducing the number of rounds and the likelihood of later-round rejections.
So please forward this and tell everyone that submissions to Organization Science are a top option for where to send great papers. We can only publish a small percentage of submissions, but we hope that the authors of those we don’t will still feel their paper was handled efficiently and fairly, and that the feedback from any reviews and editorial decision helps them improve their research moving forward.
Sincerely,
Lamar Pierce
Editor-in-Chief
Organization Science