Editors and Authors: Two Halves of a Whole

• Published in: Academic psychiatry Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 224 - 225
• Main Author: Borus, Jonathan F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer New York 01.04.2014; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Authors; Authorship - standards; Editing; Editorial Policies; Editorials; Editors; Feature: Perspective; Feedback; Humans; Medical Education; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Peer Review, Research - standards; Periodicals; Periodicals as Topic - standards; Psychiatry; Responsibilities; Writing Instruction; Writing Skills
• ISSN: 1042-9670; 1545-7230
• DOI: 10.1007/s40596-013-0003-9

Editors have to respect the time and talents of their reviewers who play a vital role in evaluating submissions, while also having high, clearly delineated, expectations of the reviewers, i.e., that they will perform timely, comprehensive reviews of each assigned paper, write helpful comments to the editor conveying their thoughts about the paper’s readiness for publication, and provide detailed comments to the author about the paper’s content and ways to make it better. Most journals have an editorial board which determines the journal’s overall direction, deputy, and/or associate editors who help with assignment and assessment of papers, and a skilled editorial administrative staff to process submissions, requests reviews, compile reviewers’ feedback, and, when necessary, “hound” anyone in the review process (editors, reviewers, authors) to meet their deadlines. Since Academic Psychiatry was then a relatively new journal interested in stimulating more high-quality submissions, it was my goal to use the review process to teach authors how to write better papers, a tradition that has continued under subsequent editors; one measure of the success of this strategy has been the increasing number of excellent papers submitted to the journal by psychiatric educators over the years. Editors are looking for papers that answer questions or provide innovative ideas relevant to their readers, so authors should read, or at least scan, recent copies of a journal to see what kinds of articles it publishes (scope of topics, type of article: “narrative” or “p value”, length restrictions, etc.) and carefully review the journal’s “Information for Contributors” so that they can format their paper correctly.