Abstract
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
A manuscript submitted earlier this year to a prominent qualitative research journal spent around 6 months in review. It languished static in the journal’s system for 8 weeks before even being reviewed. E-mails to the editor went unanswered. The months passed. When the reviews did eventually come back, these were a stream of consciousness mix of the smallest and most macro of points.
Sadly, this scenario is familiar to authors, editors, and reviewers. We are all wary of the pressures of time and how to best prioritize all the work we need to do. The handling and review of peer-review manuscripts easily slips down our priorities. This leaves editors and reviewers struggling in the wee small hours to allocate and undertake reviews and authors waiting longer and longer to hear results in relation to their submission.
It’s been just over 1 year since the International Journal of Qualitative Methods (IJQM), the journal of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (IIQM), entered its new partnership with SAGE Publications (Clark & Sousa 2015). Since this, we have worked hard to reduce the time each of our reviewed papers spends in review. For 2016, our average time from submission to first decision is a mean of 31 days. This compares exceptionally well with much larger journals and is markedly better than almost all comparable journals in social science and humanities. Why is this important and how did we achieve this?
IJQM Authors
The most important group for any journal is its authors. You, the global community of qualitative and mixed-methods researchers really do make all this possible. Sharing your insights, innovations, and advances in qualitative and mixed methods in IJQM, your contributions are the lifeblood of the journal. Without authors, there simply is no IJQM.
Why then do authors so often feel like second-class citizens in the journal submission process? Communication with editors or journal personnel is poor. Submission systems are cumbersome and taxing. It can take months to get reviews, and when they do arrive, their degree of helpfulness varies widely.
Developing IJQM with SAGE, we have sought to put authors at the center of the journal. This includes many aspects, from ensuring our website contains the most useful and accessible information on our scope, constructing the smoothest possible submission process, and seeking trusted world-renowned reviewers who also work well to deadlines for returning reviews. We are also consciously open to feedback from authors on their experiences submitting to and publishing with IJQM and strive for continues process improvement. This feedback draws our attention and efforts to elements of the journal that are important to authors. Please continue to send your feedback to any of our editors.
IJQM Reviewers
Ethical, well-informed, and helpful reviewers are pivotal to ensuring journals publish the most suitable and best work. This benefits us all. They also ensure authors get the feedback they need to make their paper the best it can be. Reviewers are always pressed for time because they are usually juggling many work tasks. Many of us get too many requests to review: Seasoned authors are likely to get one or more request to review each day. The incentives to do excellent reviews in reasonable time frames are complex. Academic departments tend to vary in the degree to which they recognize and reward journal reviewing as real work. Even if incentives are given for what is reviewed, this usually focuses on quantity of reviews done rather than the quality of these reviews. While some publishers provide feedback to reviews on the number and quality of their reviews, few departments formally take such feedback into account.
Providing high-quality reviews in reasonable time lines is not an easy task, and the earnest and often hidden contributions of reviewers need to be more appreciated. IJQM is indebted to every reviewer who has devoted their time, skills, and expertise to prioritizing reviewing for the journal. Our best reviewers in the past have been allocated places on the journal’s Editorial Board, and we look forward to finding new and different ways to recognize and celebrate their ongoing contributions.
Peer Review, Relationships, and Team Work
Teams and relationships are at the core of the work that makes for a good journal submission and review experience.
Editors need to have good relationships with their editorial team. At IJQM, we have a wonderful team of four dedicated editors who devote their time and skills to screening, reviewing, and weighing the merits of all the papers we receive. Karis Cheng, Paul Galdas, Lisa Given, and Linda Liebenberg each have a fine understanding of the journal’s remit, are fair, wise, and widely read about qualitative and mixed methods. They are also efficient in their handling of papers and knowledgeable of the global community of reviewers best able to assess manuscripts. As well as moving papers quickly and smoothly to review and publication, it’s important for us to all work together to give quickly a “no” to papers that do not fit with IJQM’s remit. This allows these authors to submit their work without delay to more suitable places.
IJQM Readers
Open access journals, like IJQM, offer a unique benefit for readers: free access to all content, always. It remains at the core of IJQM’s remit to ensure that this democratizing of knowledge remains. We also want to ensure that readers can easily read, search, and access papers easily from different devices and browsers. Recently, this resulted in the launch of newly designed IJQM webpages based on extensive feedback from website users. New features on these pages include alternative metrics, usage and Altmetric data on each paper, ORCID profiles, follow-me navigation within the article page, and enhanced home page areas for discovering IJQM’s latest content.
As we look toward the year that has just begun and continue to build for the future, we want to harness more IJQM’s unique online status among other journals by including more innovative aspects, including video, audio, and images in our papers. We would like to see more submissions—given some papers this year attained over 20,000 downloads in their first 3 months of publication, authors can rest assured their work can reach a truly large and global audience among the qualitative research community. Growth in IJQM’s impact factor this year by around 50% to 0.769 brings added credibility too. With SAGE and IIQM, the journal’s editorial team and board want to continue to raise the journal’s profile, quality, and number of submissions. Working well with you all—authors, reviewers, and readers—is integral to this.