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.