An excellent editorial in the International Journal of Research in Marketing has been written by outgoing editor Roland T. Rust offering advice to Editors and future Editors of journals.
The editorial is aimed at the journal’s immediate community of marketing researchers, but the six observations and four recommendations detailed are applicable to editors in every field.
This is a very neat summation of some of the problems in peer review; that if often involves too many rounds of review, that perfection is valued over timeliness, rigor is valued over importance, and the rigor of a methodology can be traded off against a papers potential relevance. Related to these, Rust complains that the traditional peer review system stifles creativity and innovation, with ambitious developments in the field being quashed by the conservative review process.
To counter these problems, Rust recommends accepting papers more quickly, encouraging editors to be confident in deciding the importance of a paper, and to be willing to overule the reviewer concerns of the single paper to allow the ideas to contribute to the bigger pictures developing in the field.
The editorial raises salient points in a well-argued manner, and is a worthwhile read for anyone involved in journal editorial roles.
The editorial is open access, currently in corrected proof form on the journal website and can be accessed here
Roland T. Rust, Editorial: Reflections on the review process,
International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2018.09.004