Features of Four Submission Systems

Aug 5, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

There are lots of submission systems available, all of which look wildly different but essentially do the same job – keeping all the information pertaining to your submission in one place where the editorial team can access it regardless of where they are in the world. For more information on why we use online systems to handle peer review, see our earlier post here.

At The Editorial Hub, our team predominantly works with online peer-review systems so they’re something we’re very familiar with. Here’s a quick introduction to some of our favourites!

ScholarOne Manuscripts (Clarivate)

ScholarOne (formerly Manuscript Central) is currently used by over 7,000 journals worldwide. If you’re involved in scholarly publishing in any way – be it as an author, reviewer, or editor – chances are you’ll have used ScholarOne at some point.

You know where you are with a ScholarOne system. The interface for authors and reviewers is fairly user-friendly with customisable instructions, and all the information that the editorial office needs is easily accessible. Generally speaking, ScholarOne is solid, dependable, and predictable – all good traits in a tool designed specifically to make life easier!

Editorial Manager (Aries Systems)

Also used by thousands of journals across the globe, Editorial Manager is a highly-configurable system “optimized to streamline editorial processes and communication”.

Editorial Manager has a lot of functionality and is very customisable. It also has some great menus that give you overviews of the manuscripts in progress grouped in various ways – e.g., by editor or by status – at the click of a button.

EJPress (eJournalPress)

As with the previous two, EJPress also has a lot of functionality and is “fully configurable”.

All manuscripts in progress are sorted into folders which are preceded by a big red arrow when they contain papers that are awaiting action. It has a folder containing all chasers – reminder emails for authors, reviewers, and editors – which means it’s easy for the administrator to keep an eye on all papers with overdue tasks, regardless of what stage of peer review the paper’s reached.

ReView (River Valley Technologies)

ReView is a relatively new system designed to be as user friendly as possible, with an intuitive interface that only shows users the information they need to carry out the task at hand.

One big plus for ReView is the native handling of LaTeX files, something which other systems can struggle with. It’s extremely customisable so you can tailor it to your team and their preferred workflow, and the reporting function is simple to use and provides real time data on anything you need to know.

Impact Factors

Jun 27, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

If you work in academia, you’re bound to be familiar with Impact Factors. You’ll probably know that “good journals” have an Impact Factor, and you may know that “really good journals” have a high Impact Factor. But do you know how Impact Factors are calculated? Or how journals are ranked? In short, do you know what an Impact Factor actually is?

If not, don’t worry. Consider this your Impact Factor 101.

An Impact Factor (IF) is, in essence, a fairly simple sum. A journal’s 2021 IF is calculated using citations received by that journal in 2021 for articles published in the previous two years (2019 + 2020), divided by the number of articles the journal published in those two years.

So, if in 2021 a journal received 13 citations to articles published in 2019 and 17 citations to articles published in 2020 (a total of 30) and published 35 articles over those two years; it would have a 2021 IF of 0.857.

The reason that only the previous two years are taken into consideration is simply to level the playing field. If you took into consideration citations to articles from a journal’s full history, then it would be extremely biased towards older journals who naturally have a far larger number of articles to choose from.

At the end of each year, the citations for each journal are counted and put into the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) which are published the following summer.

Which articles count towards an IF?

You have written an article published in a journal which is included in the JCR and, let’s say, it’s been published this year. Any citations your article receives next year or the year after will contribute towards the journal’s IF for those years.

Not everything published by a journal counts as “Article Content”, only Research Articles, Review Articles, Short Reports, etc. Editorials, Book Reviews, Letters to the Editor, etc, are not classed as Article Content so won’t be counted in the number of articles published. Any citations they receive the two years following publication will, however, be included in the citation count.

Alright, so what is a “good” or “high” Impact Factor?

The simple answer to that is the bigger the IF (i.e. the higher the number), the better it is. But, of course, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Different disciplines are likely to receive different levels of citations. For example, a scientific journal publishing up to the minute research in a fast-moving field is likely to receive more citations within the “IF window” (those two years after an article is published) than a humanities journal in a field which moves somewhat slower. An IF of 1.000 might be brilliant in one discipline, but be pretty poor in another.

To allow for this, journals are split into categories within the JCR and ranked within those. Therefore, rather than looking at their IF alone, to find the best journals within your field you should find the most relevant categories and see which journals rank highest within those.

For more information on the Journal Citation Reports (and Impact Factors, naturally), check out Clarivate’s website here.

Publishing Roles

Jun 14, 2022 | Scholarly publishing

When following your manuscript through from submission to acceptance, there are many different people and several different teams with whom you will come into contact. This can be confusing, to say the least!

So just who does what at each stage and, more importantly, who on earth are you supposed to go to if you have a question?!

The Managing Editor

That’s us – hello!

Sometimes referred to as an “Editorial Assistant” or “Journal Administrator”, the Managing Editor oversees the smooth running of the peer-review process. Our expertise is in the peer review-process itself, rather than the subject matter of the journal; we are the submission system’s “super users”, if you like. We keep an eye on everything to make sure that peer review runs smoothly and chase up anybody who needs it – authors, reviewers, even the editors sometimes! – allowing the academic editors to focus on the research.

You will hear from us every time you need to do something e.g., make some corrections, submit a form, or remember that you’ve got a revision deadline coming up…

The Managing Editor is your main point of contact for the journal during peer review, so anytime you have a question, it’s us you should email. Even if we’re not able to help you personally, we will know who to direct your query to.

The Editor-in-Chief

The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) is, as you would expect, the person in charge of the journal. He or she will be an expert with a broad overview of the journal’s field and will decide what content goes into the journal, how the peer-review process is run, and, to an extent, how the published content appears. How hands-on the EiC is differs journal to journal and EiC to EiC, but generally they will be the person making the final decision based on the recommendation of the reviewers and Associate Editors.

For most journals, it is best to get in touch with the Managing Editor and ask them to pass your comment or query on to the Editor-in-Chief rather than contacting them directly.

The Associate Editors

Mid-to-large journals tend to have a team of editors, rather than just one who deals with every submission personally.

There are many, many names for Associate Editors (on some journals they are even known as “Managing Editors”, just to confuse everybody) but they are the academic experts who aid the EiC by giving him or her their expert opinion and selecting reviewers for articles within their specialism.

A good editorial team of will have all of the niche subjects within the journal’s scope covered between them so that every manuscript submitted will have an expert eye cast over it, even if it’s slightly out of the EiC’s personal specialism.

How much the Associate Editors are able to assist with enquiries again varies, so The Managing Editor should still be your first port of call.