Origin Reports’ Chart of the Month – July: Decision Tree for Initial Decisions
Origin Reports’ Chart of the Month - July:Decision Tree for Initial DecisionsBy: Sherrie Hill & Jason RobertsDecision trees provide an instant visual summary of the outcomes of your peer review process, offering details that may otherwise get buried when data are presented in a tabular form. Decision trees offer an overview of a process and details of that process all at once. They can be displayed either vertically or horizontally. The figure above is an example of a vertical decision tree that outlines the initial decision ratios for a journal. When discussing a vertical decision tree, you should move from the top to the bottom and discuss the elements of each row in comparison.In this example, the blue box shows the number of manuscripts that received a decision during the set time frame, in this case the year 2019, as shown in the chart’s Parameters section.The next row separates the manuscripts that received immediate decisions from the manuscripts that went through peer review. Immediate decisions are decisions that are rendered by Editors without any input from peer reviewers.When creating an initial decision tree, you must decide how you want to handle manuscripts that do not have an actual “immediate reject”
How to Design an Effective Editorial Report: Part 4
How to Design an Effective Editorial Report: Part 4By: Jason Roberts & Sherrie HillIn this, our last post in the series on designing effective editorial reports, we will look at some editor and reviewer charts that you may want to include in your editorial reports.Editor ChartsThe editorial team often wants to understand how the journal’s editors are performing. One of the most common charts that you can include is the time from editor assignment to initial decision. This chart reports the mean time for all editors as compared to previous years. From this chart, you can tell how your team, as a whole, is performing. Your editorial team may prefer to use the median values.However, it is often beneficial to look at individual editor performance. Two key indicators are the time from editor assignment until the first reviewer is invited. Another data point that is helpful to understand is the time from when the last review was submitted until the initial decision was rendered. From these charts, you can locate pinch points in your peer review process, which lead to longer overall times for manuscripts to receive their initial decisions.Another performance indicator concerns assessing how effective your editors are at
The How and the Why of Collecting Identity Data: Part 1
The How and the Why of Collecting Identity Data: Part 1By Kristen OverstreetSeptember 20, 2021 It’s Peer Review Week 2021! This is an important event, celebrated each year in September, to focus on a specific aspect of peer review through educational opportunities, information dissemination, and open discussion. This year’s theme is “Identity in Peer Review”.Peer Review week website At Origin Reports, that makes us think about capturing data around authors’ and reviewers’ identities, which can include the following:Countries of Residence – so we can determine the ratio (or balance) of authors to reviewers in various geographic locations,Roles for Individuals – how many authors are also reviewers?ORCiDs – how many of our authors have included ORCiDs (orcid.org) in their user accounts? How many have added it to their manuscripts for publication? Should we start requiring new system users to include an ORCiD in their accounts?Expertise – what are the areas of expertise for our authors and reviewers? Are there gaps we need to fill?Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion for our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members, raises all manner of privacy questions regarding the collection of “identity” data, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and disability. By collecting this information, we could
The How and the Why of Collecting Identity Data: Part 4 Collecting and Evaluating Identity Data
The How and the Why of Collecting Identity Data: Part 4Collecting and Evaluating Identity DataBy Kristen Overstreet and Sherrie Hill November 19, 2021 How to collect identity dataIn this post, of a multipart series on identity data, we will discuss considerations for when you begin collecting and interpreting the data. Some organizations choose to collect identity data through independent software applications (e.g., SurveyMonkey), while others use their journals’ submission systems. There are pros and cons to either.At the 2021 ISMTE Global Event in October, Dr. Teo Pulvirenti, from the American Chemical Society, discussed these pros and cons. Collecting data through an independent software application ensures that there will be limited access to the raw data collected, since you can easily control who within your organization will have access. Because the data are not stored within the submission system, reviewers and authors might feel more comfortable revealing sensitive identity data. However, because it is a separate application, it does represent an additional process that must be completed by people who are typically very busy. Therefore, your journal might find that the response rate is lower than it would be for questions asked within the submission system.Some submission system vendors are working on better
Using Journal Timing Charts to Improve Manuscript Flow: A Closer Look at Editors’ and Reviewers’ Performance
Using Journal Timing Charts to Improve Manuscript Flow: A Closer Look at Editors’ and Reviewers’ PerformanceBy Sherrie Hill and Kristen OverstreetFebruary 3, 2022In today’s post, we will continue to dig deeper into the time to initial decision. Many journals report the time to initial decision as the mean (average) time to initial decision by year. While this does give insight into how the journal is performing, this is just a high-level overview of what is occurring at this stage in the workflow. The time to initial decision is impacted by the performance of multiple people, including those in the editorial office, the Editor-in-Chief (EIC), the Editors, and the Reviewers.In our previous blog, we discussed several EIC timing charts that can give insight into the process. In our next post, we will be examining editorial office performance charts. Today, we are going to be looking at editor and reviewer timing charts to gain a better understanding of their performance and time taken in peer review. We will look at these charts under a scenario where the editors invite reviewers and give their recommendations on a manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief, who makes the final decisions.The first timing chart to give more information
Reporting on Editor Performance
Reporting on Editor Performance By Sherrie Hill & Jason RobertsFor a journal office, it is very important to understand how each of your editors is performing. Are all of your editors evaluating manuscripts in the same way? Are some of the editors slower than the bulk of the editors? Are some of your editors over or underutilized? In Origin Reports, we have developed a chart that presents all this information in both graphical and tabular form. The Editor Performance bubble chart in undoubtedly information dense. Indeed, it may seem daunting initially. There are three important points to remember to help break down the data:The size of the bubble relates to the number of papers handledThe x-axis shows the mean number of days it takes for a given editor to handle a paper from assignment through reviewer selection to the delivery of either a recommendation or decisionThe y-axis holds information on the rejection rate.To simplify the chart, this illustrative example uses the Editor Name filter to limit the information displayed to only show four editors. Looking at the y-axis (Rejection Rates) we see that editor Chen has the highest rejection rate of the four editors and rejected all the manuscripts that were assigned
Using Journal Timing Charts to Improve Manuscript Flow
Using Journal Timing Charts to Improve Manuscript Flow By Sherrie Hill and Kristen Overstreet January 19, 2022 It’s time to consider what types of information we will present to our boards at upcoming editorial board meetings. Two charts that are usually included are time to initial decision and time to final decision. These excellent charts give insight into the performance of a journal over a certain time period. Our editorial boards often ask, “How can we improve these times?” <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/575e4e9be707eb86c44df175/7e4f1dd0-b085-4544-a6d0-5e5697b56a19/Figure+1+1-19-22.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/575e4e9be707eb86c44df175/05a36488-fa7e-4547-b21e-4c60d6835c85/Figure+2++1-19-22.jpg" alt="" /> In order to answer their question, we must first understand our data. Thus, let’s first consider the time to initial decision chart. In this chart, we are looking at the time from submission of a manuscript to the time an Editor makes a decision. During this time frame, the submission may be handled by the editorial office, the Editor-in-Chief, an associate editor and/or a section editor and/or a methods editor and or a statistical editor, and by peer reviewers. There are many components in the time to initial decision. For a journal to make a significant improvement in their time to initial decision, a breakdown by stage must be examined. Example Peer Review Workflow In our example peer review workflow, the
How to Design an Effective Editorial Report: Part 3
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