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Last week the Midwest Economics Association (MEA) meetings were taking place in Minneapolis. Because a few friends were presenting at MEA, I decided to go check out the sessions at which they were presenting.

At one of the sessions I attended, a graduate student presented a very cool paper in which he had run a randomized controlled trial to determine the effect of a treatment variable D on an outcome Y, randomizing D and collecting information on a number of control variables X in addition to collecting information on Y.

The graduate student came from a good department, so he carefully motivated his paper by talking about the policy relevance of the relationship between D and Y, explaining that policy makers cared deeply about said relationship, and how they made a big deal of it.

When presenting his results, the presenter did what we commonly do in economics, which is to show a table presenting several specifications of the regression of interest, from the most parsimonious (i.e., a simple regression of Y on just D) to the least parsimonious (i.e., a complex regression of Y on D and all the available controls X).

The problem, however, was that the R-squared measure–the regression’s coefficient of determination–for the simple regression of Y on just D (i.e., the most parsimonious specification) was about 0.01, meaning that the treatment variable D explained about 1 percent of the outcome of interest.

I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the end of 2013, which means that I handle submissions in my areas of expertise, deciding which manuscripts get reviewed and which ones get desk rejected, selecting reviewers for those manuscripts that do get reviewed, and so on.

Once again, I wanted to feature a few articles from the latest issue of the journal. There is nothing special about those articles beyond the fact that I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog.

In November 2013, I joined the editorial staff of Food Policy, an interdisciplinary journal owned by Elsevier, as an associate editor.

Though I had been serving as associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) for over a year when I became associate editor at Food Policy, the responsibilities of an associate editor vary from journal to journal.

At the AJAE, associate editors do not handle manuscripts. Rather, we are more like super-referees who can be asked to review manuscripts up to five or six times a year, break ties between conflicting reviews, and provide quick feedback when asked by one of the four editors.

At Food Policy, associate editors have a lot more responsibility. We are assigned manuscripts in out broad areas of research, we choose whether to desk reject those manuscripts or send them out to reviewers, and we choose reviewers when we send manuscripts out for review.

On May 1, I will become editor of Food Policy, replacing the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies’ Bhavani Shankar, and sharing the role of editor with the University of Bologna’s Mario Mazzocchi, serving for an initial term of three years.

Given that, I thought now would be as good a time as any to write my thoughts about the editorial process. This will allow me to go back to these thoughts once my term as editor ends, to see what else I might have learned. So here goes–in no particular order–some thoughts I’ve accumulated on the editorial process in the social sciences. I hope others with editorial experience can chime in with their own additional thoughts in the comments.