SPEAKER_2: Recker, my brother, what's going on?
SPEAKER_1: Nick, my man, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_1: I'm feeling good.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you for not asking.
SPEAKER_2: Hey, so listen, you and I talked not that long ago, and we talk about this every once in a while as editors.
SPEAKER_2: And I know you, you're editor-in-chief for CAIS, you're editor, senior editor at MISQ, you've had some good editorial experience.
SPEAKER_2: I have some editorial experience at ISR and MISQ.
SPEAKER_2: And then our good buddy, Jason Thatcher.
SPEAKER_2: What have you, Jason, you were senior editor at ISR.
SPEAKER_2: You're next.
SPEAKER_2: You're editor at MISQ.
SPEAKER_2: What other editorial?
SPEAKER_3: I've done GIS as a senior editor.
SPEAKER_3: I've done database as an AE.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, database for advances.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, a long time ago.
SPEAKER_1: Cool.
SPEAKER_3: That was a good experience, actually.
SPEAKER_2: You were never on JAIS, Jason?
SPEAKER_3: No, I was in SE there for a long time.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, that's what you said.
SPEAKER_2: I thought you said GIS.
SPEAKER_3: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_3: GIS.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know anything about math.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I was going to ask you.
SPEAKER_3: It's interesting, actually.
SPEAKER_2: The JAIS.
SPEAKER_3: But I don't have the time to figure out all the layers and stuff.
SPEAKER_3: And then, I'm trying to think.
SPEAKER_3: AISTCI, I was on the board for a long time.
SPEAKER_3: I still am, but I don't do very many papers because I am kind of swamped with wrapping up ISR still.
SPEAKER_3: I still have 10 or 12 in my queue, plus all the quarterly stuff coming in.
SPEAKER_3: So that was actually a surprise how hard it was to do both.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So here's a guy who's busy.
SPEAKER_2: So Recker, as an editor, between the three of us, we should probably have a pretty good amount of experience editing.
SPEAKER_2: So how's this for today?
SPEAKER_2: Let's discuss.
SPEAKER_2: We're going to give advice to editors.
SPEAKER_2: All editors out there, and yes, aspiring editors, authors, anyone.
SPEAKER_2: Authors, I suggest you take the lessons from this podcast and use it to argue with your editors that we're going to tell them.
SPEAKER_1: That can be very dangerous.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, I like it.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, why not?
SPEAKER_2: Don't let them elicit in this podcast.
SPEAKER_2: This is going to be 101 for how to be an editor is what we're going to do.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_2: So what we did, and we never prepared, but today we prepared.
SPEAKER_2: Each of us showed up with a list, and it was supposed to be five things.
SPEAKER_2: But I mean, Jason, before we started, told me you have 10.
SPEAKER_2: I have more than five.
SPEAKER_2: Recker, you probably didn't do your homework.
SPEAKER_1: I have four.
SPEAKER_1: Actually, I wrote on seven, but I only like four of them.
SPEAKER_1: So, I have four.
SPEAKER_2: That's what we're going to do.
SPEAKER_2: Let's do a round robin.
SPEAKER_2: Everybody gets to pick one, and Jason is our guest.
SPEAKER_2: Why don't you start us off?
SPEAKER_2: Pick your favorite first.
SPEAKER_2: What's the rule to be an editor?
SPEAKER_2: We're educating editors, right?
SPEAKER_3: Mind reading.
SPEAKER_2: What?
SPEAKER_3: Mind reading.
SPEAKER_3: It's like, I told you, I came up with superpowers.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't come up with being editors.
SPEAKER_3: These are editorial superpowers.
SPEAKER_1: I feel like you have to explain that one a little bit.
SPEAKER_3: I'm going to explain that one.
SPEAKER_3: And what it means is you anticipate how the community is going to respond to a paper.
SPEAKER_3: And when you get that first paper and you do the first cut, you have to be able to read the paper and actually see through the paper, because often they're not that great, and ask yourself, how is the community going to respond?
SPEAKER_3: How does it contribute to where we're going?
SPEAKER_3: And is it possible to get it there?
SPEAKER_3: And I think that's the number one superpower of a good editor.
SPEAKER_3: Because often we get not great papers and we help people make them great.
SPEAKER_2: But when you say mind reading, you're assuming it's in the mind of the author.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes it's not.
SPEAKER_3: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_3: I'm assuming I'm reading the mind of the community.
SPEAKER_2: Of the community.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you have to have your finger on the pulse of the community.
SPEAKER_3: Because if we don't accept papers, no one's going to read, right?
SPEAKER_3: We want to accept papers that touch the discourse, that move the discourse forward, and they have the potential.
SPEAKER_3: And really it's not accept, it's extend a revision to in that first round.
SPEAKER_3: That's the riskiest round.
SPEAKER_3: And if the paper is interesting, but it has nothing to do with what the IS community is doing, it's not a good fit for the journal.
SPEAKER_1: All right, let me play that back, Jason.
SPEAKER_1: So what you're saying is like you get a paper, like around one submission signed to you, and you're asking yourself, when I accept this paper and it shows up in one of these table of content alerts in the paper, how is Jan Recker going to react to when he gets this email, when he sees it?
SPEAKER_3: That's exactly what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_2: So it's like your finger is on the pulse of the community, and you know that if something is appropriate, you're going to usher it in.
SPEAKER_1: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: This is a good opportunity.
SPEAKER_1: Can you name an example of a paper where you did that, that may have come out where you were an editor?
SPEAKER_1: Can you give a nice example?
SPEAKER_3: I like every paper I accept, I feel that way.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: So I mean, I really do.
SPEAKER_3: When I look at your AI special issue, you guys did a really good job of theoretically sampling the field and tapping into what a bunch of different people, and I'm not kissing up here because you accepted my paper, but you did a really good job of theoretically sampling the field and seeding a bunch of different conversations, right?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, that was the goal.
SPEAKER_3: I think that's what we should be doing as senior editors.
SPEAKER_3: I think that's the first and foremost thing, is we should be picking provocative papers that when you skim the content, you're going to go, oh, this isn't just another scraped paper where I counted the number of thumbs ups.
SPEAKER_3: And I did a little experiment to count whether the purple thumbs up versus a green thumbs up made it better or jokes or something.
SPEAKER_3: I want something that's really going to move the ball forward and get people engaged.
SPEAKER_3: And the best person I saw that I think of when I think of like who had that superpower, when it was Anne Majchrzak back in the day before she retired.
SPEAKER_3: Like, she was, she was really...
SPEAKER_2: Well, Anne Myshock.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I can't pronounce her name.
SPEAKER_2: Her name is Myshock.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so, you know, I'm not...
SPEAKER_2: Anne is awesome at that.
SPEAKER_2: You're right.
SPEAKER_3: She's just really good at picking great papers.
SPEAKER_1: I think sometimes she even goes out to hunt these papers.
SPEAKER_1: When she learns about these papers, she's like, send them to me, send them to me.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, and I think that's important.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, Anne Myshock has been an editor on two of my papers.
SPEAKER_2: One, a forthcoming in MySQL, one was like over a decade ago in OrgSci.
SPEAKER_2: Both of those papers.
SPEAKER_2: So she, actually a lot of what I do as an editor, there are a couple of people that I imitate.
SPEAKER_2: I basically imitate Anne, Andrew, ABJ, and Amrit, Tawana.
SPEAKER_2: These are people who were senior editors when I was kind of coming up as an associate editor.
SPEAKER_2: And you're right, the things that they modeled, I try to embrace.
SPEAKER_2: And one of those is, they have a sense, they have like a salesman instinct for what the community needs.
SPEAKER_2: And then they give it to them.
SPEAKER_2: So I'm going to go with number two.
SPEAKER_2: We're going to go to meet with the epic visit.
SPEAKER_2: It flows from this.
SPEAKER_2: You have that pulse of the community.
SPEAKER_2: You know what's interesting to the community.
SPEAKER_2: We can move the community forward.
SPEAKER_2: And then you give the authors a path to publication.
SPEAKER_2: Instead of just saying, Hey, it's nice and make the record.
SPEAKER_2: You and I talked about this.
SPEAKER_2: They'll bring me the rock parable where some senior editors will do this.
SPEAKER_2: They'll be like, yeah, make the address what the the review team says and, oh, make the front end stronger and make the back end stronger and make your literature review strong.
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, this is probably a risky revision at risk, high risk revision, but make everything stronger.
SPEAKER_2: And it's like, great.
SPEAKER_2: So strong and it's a risky revision.
SPEAKER_2: It's much better to be like, hey, go with what reviewer one says.
SPEAKER_2: This is how you should handle reviewer two.
SPEAKER_2: Don't worry about this comment.
SPEAKER_2: I think you should go this way or use your discretion for this one.
SPEAKER_2: You'd be very explicit.
SPEAKER_2: Say, this is what your paper is about.
SPEAKER_2: Get rid of these other.
SPEAKER_2: And my shock was wonderful at that.
SPEAKER_2: She would say, no, this is what your paper is about.
SPEAKER_2: Get rid of that other stuff.
SPEAKER_2: I want you to focus on this.
SPEAKER_2: The paper she just accepted from us that's coming up, that's exactly what she did.
SPEAKER_2: She, after the first round, said, I don't like this.
SPEAKER_2: I don't like this.
SPEAKER_2: This I like.
SPEAKER_2: That's what your paper is going to be about.
SPEAKER_2: Right?
SPEAKER_2: And it's a conceptual paper.
SPEAKER_2: The path to publication.
SPEAKER_2: They're editors.
SPEAKER_2: They're not vote counters.
SPEAKER_2: They're not just hanging out judging.
SPEAKER_2: No, they're editing like a newspaper editor.
SPEAKER_2: They go and tell you, do this, do that, do this other thing.
SPEAKER_2: And here's how you're going to navigate your reviews, right?
SPEAKER_2: The path to publication.
SPEAKER_2: What do you guys think?
SPEAKER_2: Is that a good rule number two?
SPEAKER_1: Yep.
SPEAKER_1: I like it.
SPEAKER_1: No questions asked.
SPEAKER_1: I have a very different one.
SPEAKER_1: Give me, let me, rule number three.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not sure whether you guys like it.
SPEAKER_1: When you get a paper signed, which is an email from ScholarOne or something from the EIC, act on it in one day.
SPEAKER_1: Act on it by tomorrow.
SPEAKER_2: Ooh, I like it.
SPEAKER_1: Right, so that means like if when you get an email, don't let it sit till next Saturday.
SPEAKER_1: Don't let it wait for a week until you open the PDF.
SPEAKER_1: Like click on it, get the PDF, have a look at the paper, start thinking about it, and then make up your mind tomorrow whether you want to assign an AE, whether you want to invite reviewers, or in fact, if you make a decision like maybe I'll desk reject it.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, I'm not saying you need to desk reject it in a day, but act on it.
SPEAKER_1: Start acting on it within one day when you get the paper.
SPEAKER_2: Can I add to that?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Can I say act on it in a day and get it off your lap in under two weeks?
SPEAKER_2: So yes, you act on it in a day and if you assign it in a day, then you're good.
SPEAKER_2: If you're going to do a desk revision or a desk reject, or then you do that soon, like not three weeks, not four weeks.
SPEAKER_2: Now, if you get the AE report back to you, you look at it and within two weeks, you have your SE report back to the authors.
SPEAKER_1: Five days.
SPEAKER_1: I give myself five days for that.
SPEAKER_2: So I would give myself a week as well, although I've been falling short of that a couple of times lately.
SPEAKER_2: I give myself a week, but I was figuring for other people and you can give them two weeks.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's fine.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I think you guys are superhuman.
SPEAKER_3: I aspire to that, but sometimes it takes me longer.
SPEAKER_3: Maybe I need more time to think, and maybe I'm in the middle of a heavy grading period.
SPEAKER_3: But I think within two weeks to a month, if it's a test project is okay, unless I need to do some extra reading to understand the paper.
SPEAKER_1: Like I said, start acting on it.
SPEAKER_1: I didn't say like decide on it, but it's like start looking at it so you can start thinking about it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I always look at it and then I think who should be the AE, and then I try to figure out the COIs that are hidden somewhere in there.
SPEAKER_3: Because that's important.
SPEAKER_3: You want to make sure every paper gets a fair shake.
SPEAKER_3: But right now, I am not as fast as I would like to be.
SPEAKER_1: But can I say this?
SPEAKER_1: This is going to be, I guess, a little bit provocative.
SPEAKER_1: It's not against you, anyone.
SPEAKER_1: It's actually not even against editors.
SPEAKER_1: I just see this as a, what do you call it, a carte blanche excuse all the time.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, my teaching intensive period is starting or right now or whatever.
SPEAKER_1: I can only get to this in three weeks.
SPEAKER_1: I'm like, what?
SPEAKER_1: You have to teach right now?
SPEAKER_1: Does that mean you're teaching 24-7?
SPEAKER_1: No, that probably means like that two times a week, you have three hours or whatever, you have to do some teaching.
SPEAKER_1: You get student labels, I know, I'm teaching, I've been teaching for 20 years, I know what that means, I know what intensive teaching means.
SPEAKER_1: It does not mean that you can't do anything else for a month.
SPEAKER_1: I hate that excuse.
SPEAKER_1: I really hate it.
SPEAKER_2: I think that's plus.
SPEAKER_2: You know why they'd say that?
SPEAKER_2: Because they don't put time aside to review or edit.
SPEAKER_2: They think that, oh, my main thing is submitting papers and my main thing is doing my teaching, and my main thing is all that.
SPEAKER_2: And then when I have time on my hands, I can do reviews and editing.
SPEAKER_2: The fact is, you have to make time, just like everything else, and prioritize it because you're submitting your shitty work to everybody, having them read it, and you're asking every time you submit a paper, you're asking two, three, five people to look at that paper, give you comments, you're producing papers, you're submitting them, you expect timely comments, and then yet you wait for a month or so.
SPEAKER_2: No, if you're producing papers, that means there should be time on your calendar every single week and you're busy.
SPEAKER_2: I'm freaking an administrator in my ori-
SPEAKER_2: and I teach and do all kinds of things and I have too many, and I will every single week move my reviewing and editing forward.
SPEAKER_3: So I buy that, but in terms of making swift decisions, I have to think about the papers before I actually make the decision.
SPEAKER_2: Well, wait, when you say you have to think about the paper, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_2: To me, it means I go for a day, I read the paper, then I think about it for the night.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe the next day I'll think about it.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe I'll do some things, maybe I'll read some, but it's like two days and I already have the review comments in front of me.
SPEAKER_2: I don't need to think about this for weeks.
SPEAKER_3: I'm going to interject or talk over here for a sec, because I'm just as smart as you.
SPEAKER_3: I sometimes have to go read additional papers because I want to make sure I'm making the right decision.
SPEAKER_1: I get that, Jason.
SPEAKER_1: This is why I very deliberately say start acting on these things when they come in.
SPEAKER_1: Because I got the same thing.
SPEAKER_1: What I want is when the paper comes in, when the reviews come in, literally when it works out, literally when the review is submitted and get that email, I look at it.
SPEAKER_1: Not because I'm not deciding in that moment, but it's now in my head.
SPEAKER_1: I've read it and I start thinking about it.
SPEAKER_1: That's all it takes.
SPEAKER_1: Next time I'll go for a run, I can think about the paper, I can think about the review, I can think about my decisions.
SPEAKER_1: Tomorrow, I can read a paper if I have to do it, etc.
SPEAKER_1: That way, I can actually turn it around in three, four, five days.
SPEAKER_1: At the moment, I have a difficult paper to handle.
SPEAKER_1: It's been sitting on my lap for over a week.
SPEAKER_1: I'm now getting anxious to get it out.
SPEAKER_1: But it's difficult and I don't want to rush it.
SPEAKER_1: But I've been thinking about it ever since the very second that I got that email, because that's when I clicked on it, looked at it, looked at the review package, and started pondering.
SPEAKER_1: Then I can do some extra work.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying deciding.
SPEAKER_1: I said acting.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, by that part, I'm just saying that I don't want to have the listeners think that we're going to get the paper, we're going to look at it, and they're going to get a decision in five days if it's a desk reject.
SPEAKER_1: I've done that too, by the way.
SPEAKER_1: I've written desk reject and then I waited for a week to send it out, but I had to have it written up, but I didn't want to look like I spent a day on your paper, which in fact I did.
SPEAKER_1: Anyway, hey, Jason.
SPEAKER_3: Now you hit my next superpower.
SPEAKER_2: No, not next.
SPEAKER_2: I'm going to just close the loop on this one because I do agree with something you said, Jason, and that's like I need to read the paper.
SPEAKER_2: You're right.
SPEAKER_2: I need to read a couple of papers and I think that's one of the things, we can almost make this another rule in and of itself, which is that I don't think that a lot of, and this is probably why you're a good editor, you take it on yourself to understand the substance of the argument and the conversation that they're in.
SPEAKER_2: If you're not immediately familiar with it, you'll go read.
SPEAKER_2: Too often, I don't think senior editors, they'll read the paper hopefully, but they read the comments, they vote count, and then they don't go back to those original papers that you're citing, the original books.
SPEAKER_2: I had, I forget which, I don't know if it was Anne.
SPEAKER_2: It might have been Anne Majchak.
SPEAKER_2: It was.
SPEAKER_2: When we wrote the first version of that paper that went three years at MISQ, or two years, the last two years at MISQ, we've been working on it.
SPEAKER_2: She's been senior editor.
SPEAKER_2: We cited a book.
SPEAKER_2: We ended up not going that direction on affordances.
SPEAKER_2: This Davis person, she has this book, but we cited the book on affordances and read the book in the first senior editor.
SPEAKER_2: In our first revision, she read, she goes, I was interested in this, so I went and read the book by this Davis person on affordances and I'll get it.
SPEAKER_2: I hope I'm not missing the name.
SPEAKER_2: Then she parsed the book, came back to us and said, and we ended up not really using it too much in the paper, but in that first version we did, and she went and read the book.
SPEAKER_2: Now, what you are saying is exactly what we should be doing.
SPEAKER_2: If you don't know the substance of their conversation, as a senior editor, you should.
SPEAKER_2: So I think that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_2: If that extends it out beyond the first few days, great.
SPEAKER_1: So that's your second rule, Nick?
SPEAKER_1: I think really.
SPEAKER_2: I guess that's my second rule that I'm adding to our rules.
SPEAKER_1: Jason, give us a new superpower or an anti-superpower.
SPEAKER_3: So I think you have to have laser vision.
SPEAKER_3: We've hinted at that, but I think as an SC, you have to be able to see through all the different competing reviews, some of which feel like they're written by ChatGPT right now.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: And you have to see through the AE report sometimes, and really actually see through all that clutter, what's the path to publication?
SPEAKER_3: And I think that kind of aligns with what you're saying, Jan and Nick earlier.
SPEAKER_3: But I think you really have to be able to go through and say, look, these are the three, four or five things I want you to do.
SPEAKER_3: And for me, that usually comes in the second round.
SPEAKER_3: In the first round, I let the authors wander a bit more because it's their paper they should explore.
SPEAKER_3: And the second round, you should know, right?
SPEAKER_3: You should really know the path.
SPEAKER_3: You see a path to publication.
SPEAKER_3: Damn right.
SPEAKER_2: I love that.
SPEAKER_2: So it's the path to publication, but second round.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, not third round, not fourth, not fifth.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, at one point, you're telling the authors, do this to get published.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I love that.
SPEAKER_2: Second round, clear path.
SPEAKER_2: What do you think about this, Jason?
SPEAKER_2: How often, how long should you use reviewers?
SPEAKER_3: I have been toying with that a lot lately.
SPEAKER_3: So I used to think it should go into the fifth round, if there were things I wasn't quite sure about, because my reviewers are experts.
SPEAKER_3: But lately, I've been saying, thanks and I don't need you anymore to reviewers after the second or third round.
SPEAKER_3: It really just depends.
SPEAKER_2: So go ahead, Sir.
SPEAKER_1: Very rarely do I use them in the third round.
SPEAKER_1: Because again, first of all, I don't think we have a lot of experts left.
SPEAKER_1: So let me qualify that.
SPEAKER_1: So what I mean is, how often do you really have a paper where, let's stay with Anmarszak.
SPEAKER_1: So that is really a paper that really directly speaks to her, let's say, collaborative affordances or whatever, these sorts of things, and then she is the expert on the topic and it directly speaks to her and it's complicated.
SPEAKER_1: So I really need to ask her four times.
SPEAKER_1: How often is that really the case?
SPEAKER_1: So more often I get like, okay, I have a paper, I need someone from social networking, I need someone that knows computation analysis, and I need someone that can handle this and that theory.
SPEAKER_1: So these are more, they have good knowledge of these particular method, domains, theories, whatever phenomena.
SPEAKER_1: Are they really expert?
SPEAKER_1: Do I really need to drill really, really, really down?
SPEAKER_1: I've had that in one of my papers.
SPEAKER_1: We had, I'm not sure whether it was Gioia himself, or, you know, Gioia expert deep into the fourth round.
SPEAKER_1: Fair enough, fair enough.
SPEAKER_1: But most of the time I don't have that.
SPEAKER_1: And then I have someone who says like, from the social network, there's a contribution, that's fine.
SPEAKER_1: And I know that after the second or third round, I know there's a contribution or not.
SPEAKER_1: If it's a method guy, I know after a round or two, if the experiments are good or not, they're not going to change.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't see a need of asking them three or four times, because frankly speaking, I rarely ever actually have a need for deep expertise.
SPEAKER_1: Nor do I get them necessarily.
SPEAKER_1: Sorry.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I could tell you a funny story.
SPEAKER_2: My 2014 paper, it was a social materiality special issue at MISQ.
SPEAKER_2: So James Gaskin, Colley, Young, Jane and I wrote this.
SPEAKER_1: The zooming paper?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, zooming in and out and what, sociotechnical routines.
SPEAKER_2: We actually did a find and replace of sociomaterial for sociotechnical.
SPEAKER_2: We wrote the paper, sociotechnical.
SPEAKER_2: There's a special issue for sociomaterial, so we did a find and replace.
SPEAKER_3: And we just did not, it did not.
SPEAKER_1: That's horrible.
SPEAKER_3: We're turning this into like MTV confessionals.
SPEAKER_1: That is by the way, that says a lot about this entire sociomateriality debate.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So, but that's just it.
SPEAKER_2: We were beat up a little bit by the sociomateriality people in the first couple rounds.
SPEAKER_2: So we, we argued and we argued using Heidegger, right?
SPEAKER_2: We argued using a lot of like the core kind of assumptions around the ontological.
SPEAKER_2: This was the heyday of ontological inseparability.
SPEAKER_2: Well, whatever.
SPEAKER_2: So, so we sent it there and it went two rounds.
SPEAKER_2: After two rounds, the, all the reviewers were like, yeah, we buy the argument.
SPEAKER_2: I guess you're right.
SPEAKER_2: But none of them, apparently none of the editors and none of the reviewers because we used Habermas quite a bit in that paper.
SPEAKER_2: And you know, we have Collie on our author team.
SPEAKER_2: And it's like he's the Habermas expert of our field.
SPEAKER_2: So it's, you know, so the editors decided, oh, we need to add a Habermas expert.
SPEAKER_2: And this was like in the third round or maybe even fourth round.
SPEAKER_2: They added a reviewer because we had so much Habermas, they needed to add a Habermas expert.
SPEAKER_2: So they added the Habermas expert.
SPEAKER_2: We get the reviews back.
SPEAKER_2: The guy said nothing about Habermas.
SPEAKER_2: Instead, it was all this socio-materiality, you know, ontological, et cetera.
SPEAKER_2: He was basically yet another socio-material reviewer that we had to deal with in order to get published after we already spent a couple of rounds dealing with all the others.
SPEAKER_2: And yeah, I think that that's what happens.
SPEAKER_2: I think you have these editors who don't want to just be like, hey, so let the argument happen in the journal.
SPEAKER_2: We don't have to make every argument.
SPEAKER_2: Like, you know, if it's a cool idea, publish the damn thing, let people argue with it after it's been published.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have to make everyone love everything before it's published.
SPEAKER_3: So what happened to you, I would call, is an editor being a super villain.
SPEAKER_3: So let's do a super villain power.
SPEAKER_3: It's when the editor lacks courage.
SPEAKER_3: So they bring in a fourth reviewer to confirm either the reject because they're nervous that they might be making a mistake or they're bringing in a fourth reviewer because they want to have their opinion built up.
SPEAKER_3: They want to be confirmed.
SPEAKER_3: And I absolutely hate it when that happens.
SPEAKER_3: That's happened to me a number of times, and it's happened to me at JIS, more than it's happened to me at the Quarterly or ISR, where the editor is like, well, you know, you're in your second or third round, you've done everything we've asked, but I decided to get a third opinion, and that third opinion is always a reject decision.
SPEAKER_3: Just if the editor is going to reject the paper, just say you don't like the paper.
SPEAKER_3: Don't extend it out.
SPEAKER_3: Don't add two months by adding this extra person.
SPEAKER_3: Just say no, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_3: That's your choice.
SPEAKER_3: But you shouldn't have to go and get social proof, and that's all it is, right?
SPEAKER_3: Social proof that my paper sucks.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: So like I'm fully with you, I would even go as far as like I don't like, to me very often as an editor, that's the third review or not even the fourth, because I like working with two reviewers only.
SPEAKER_1: But I just want to jump into the defense of JS a little bit.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an editor there as well, and I know that's one of the policies.
SPEAKER_1: They want you to do that.
SPEAKER_1: They have that special AI role there, that they want to bring in a senior reviewers in case that you have two or three reviewers where you don't have a clear picture.
SPEAKER_1: So, it's kind of the journal form.
SPEAKER_3: I think it's a supervillain thing.
SPEAKER_3: I don't care if it's the policy.
SPEAKER_3: It's a supervillain policy.
SPEAKER_3: It's not good for the field.
SPEAKER_1: I agree with that as well.
SPEAKER_1: I'm just saying this is not necessarily to follow the editor.
SPEAKER_1: They're just following whatever the...
SPEAKER_3: The editor doesn't have to do it.
SPEAKER_3: You know how this works.
SPEAKER_3: Once you get the paper, the editor-in-chief leaves you alone unless you screw up.
SPEAKER_3: And that's the piece that a lot of people listening may not understand.
SPEAKER_3: You know, be it Sue, Super, Monodipa, whoever.
SPEAKER_3: Once they assign the paper, it is wholly the providence of the senior editor at our top journals.
SPEAKER_3: It's really on the editor if these things happen.
SPEAKER_3: It's not on the EIC.
SPEAKER_3: The EIC is doing their very best job to pick the very best SE.
SPEAKER_3: And I think most of them do a really good job of that most of the time.
SPEAKER_2: Jason, I really love what you're saying.
SPEAKER_2: And more than what you're saying, I like the way you framed it.
SPEAKER_2: You said courage, lack the courage.
SPEAKER_2: And the flip side of that is they're very risk averse.
SPEAKER_2: So if you don't have courage, then you're risk averse.
SPEAKER_2: You're worried about other people's opinions.
SPEAKER_2: You're worried about whatever.
SPEAKER_2: So you end up making, you know, publishing only really polished, strongly, rigorously, you know, boring ass papers.
SPEAKER_2: Anything clever, different, original, maybe a little bit off-kilter, you're never going to accept.
SPEAKER_2: Because you lack the courage, because you're risk-averse.
SPEAKER_2: And that's what it does.
SPEAKER_2: So we need some beautifully rigorous, well-done methodological papers.
SPEAKER_2: We also need some, you know, conceptual, some maybe not so interesting to start conversations, right?
SPEAKER_2: So what you're saying about courage is I will put exclamation marks after that one here on my list.
SPEAKER_1: Let me jump in here because I have one that also speaks to courage.
SPEAKER_1: My next rule is accept and reject papers one round earlier than you feel comfortable with them.
SPEAKER_1: So what I mean is like often you don't really know whether you should reject it, so you send it out and then you know, oh yeah, okay, I got three to reject, et cetera, you know, now I can comfortably reject it.
SPEAKER_1: The same with I can accept this paper now, but really I think you should send it back to the authors and do these 27 polishing things.
SPEAKER_1: Like at both of these points in time you should have rejected or you should have accepted it already.
SPEAKER_1: Like I know I have to tell that myself, especially at the accept stage, I said like, just leave it as it is.
SPEAKER_1: We can go one more round and you will find 30 things and sentences that they can make better.
SPEAKER_1: Just accept the damn thing.
SPEAKER_1: And if I feel like I probably should reject it, but then just reject it.
SPEAKER_1: Like to reject the round earlier than you feel comfortable.
SPEAKER_1: That's my rule.
SPEAKER_2: Can I put a footnote on this with acceptances?
SPEAKER_2: That yes, 100 percent.
SPEAKER_2: But then this is how, this is the process by which you accept a round earlier.
SPEAKER_2: You used your reviewers for two rounds, period.
SPEAKER_2: They are there to give you advice.
SPEAKER_2: They have surfaced anything major, so you're aware of any major weaknesses for the paper.
SPEAKER_2: Fine.
SPEAKER_2: Now you conditionally accept.
SPEAKER_2: And then you give conditions.
SPEAKER_2: And those conditions can be big, but, you know, let it go two more rounds if you want until they meet your conditions.
SPEAKER_2: But you no longer need to involve the editors or the reviewers, you know, right?
SPEAKER_2: But you've given conditions and those conditions can be substantial.
SPEAKER_1: Nick, I think in the managing especially issue, I was at Jerry Kane's paper.
SPEAKER_1: I think they went through four rounds of conditional acceptance.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, that's faculty abuse.
SPEAKER_3: You should, whoever does that sort of a better put on their neck and not be allowed in your authors.
SPEAKER_1: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_1: These are really, you know, quick, do this, do this, do this.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Very fast iterations.
SPEAKER_1: I think they got like two, three weeks for each of them.
SPEAKER_1: It's like, all right, let's do this, do this, do this, do this.
SPEAKER_2: Jason, our special issue, we accepted papers in November of whatever year that was.
SPEAKER_2: And then we had the, what, a year later, we had the special issue published.
SPEAKER_2: After a year and three months or something.
SPEAKER_1: And none of the papers went under less than four rounds.
SPEAKER_1: Like we just did four rounds in a year instead of four rounds in three years.
SPEAKER_3: Look, I was so skeptical when you guys said you're going to do it.
SPEAKER_3: I was so skeptical that you could do it the way you did it.
SPEAKER_3: I thought what you did was great.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not being critical of that.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just listening to four conditional accepts.
SPEAKER_3: That's all I'm fixated on here.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I'm not saying this is the best practice.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying this is the best practice.
SPEAKER_3: It does sound awful.
SPEAKER_2: Unless it's very specific conditions.
SPEAKER_3: Which I think is fair.
SPEAKER_2: Section 3, your first two paragraphs are a bit of a mess.
SPEAKER_2: Clean those up in this way.
SPEAKER_2: Do this robustness check.
SPEAKER_2: Make sure, do this.
SPEAKER_2: Give three very specific things.
SPEAKER_2: You get it back.
SPEAKER_2: If it's perfect, great.
SPEAKER_2: If it's not, hey, get a professional editor.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: I'm okay with that.
SPEAKER_3: I actually did a conditional accept yesterday, day before.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't like the paper's title.
SPEAKER_3: It just wasn't descriptive enough for the paper.
SPEAKER_3: I was like, this is a great paper, but nobody's going to cite it because your title is boring.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_1: I do that all the time.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: So I'm like conditional accept.
SPEAKER_3: Get it back to me within a week with a title that I can cite.
SPEAKER_2: You want to know what?
SPEAKER_2: We talked about Ann Myshock.
SPEAKER_2: You know what she did in my 2012 worksite paper?
SPEAKER_2: So the thing was done.
SPEAKER_2: It was beautiful.
SPEAKER_2: It was two junior faculty.
SPEAKER_2: It was two assistant professors.
SPEAKER_2: It was me and my buddy, J.
SPEAKER_2: Gu, Li.
SPEAKER_2: And so she's like, all right, I like this paper, conditional accept, but your introduction sucks.
SPEAKER_2: Let's get on a phone call.
SPEAKER_2: I got on the phone with her.
SPEAKER_2: We had the introduction up.
SPEAKER_2: And she talked to me through writing it.
SPEAKER_2: She was the senior editor.
SPEAKER_2: She actually got on the phone with me to make sure my argument flowed.
SPEAKER_2: She basically gave me a little bit of a lesson on how to do an introduction on the phone.
SPEAKER_2: And then that's the introduction that is not published in the paper.
SPEAKER_3: So I think we need an Ann Senior Editor Award in the field.
SPEAKER_3: I think we should just call it the Ann M because I can't pronounce her last name properly.
SPEAKER_3: Not going to happen.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just an awful person with pronunciations.
SPEAKER_3: But to me, she really embodied what a senior editor should do when she was active.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, is she off the board?
SPEAKER_2: I guess she is.
SPEAKER_3: She retired.
SPEAKER_3: She's one of those people.
SPEAKER_3: This is one thing I actually love about her legacy.
SPEAKER_3: She finished what she was doing.
SPEAKER_3: She wrapped things up.
SPEAKER_3: She's actually still managing one of my papers.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not kissing up through this podcast.
SPEAKER_3: Who knows what will happen with it?
SPEAKER_3: But she didn't make a big fuss on her way out.
SPEAKER_3: There was no victory lap or victory tour.
SPEAKER_3: She just declared, mission accomplished.
SPEAKER_3: I did a good job and it's gone on with her life.
SPEAKER_3: I really respect people that behave that way.
SPEAKER_1: That's pretty good for her.
SPEAKER_1: Do you want me to do another one or you have a villain power or a superpower, Jason?
SPEAKER_1: Give us one more.
SPEAKER_3: Let me think.
SPEAKER_3: Which one will make you most irritated?
SPEAKER_3: Invulnerability.
SPEAKER_3: I think that you have to have a really strong capacity to make difficult decisions, take criticism of challenging the interactions with conferences, because I've actually had authors yell at me.
SPEAKER_3: But you have to have that.
SPEAKER_3: It's not courage.
SPEAKER_3: It's this resilience that it takes to be a senior editor.
SPEAKER_3: And that's something you have to go into the job with.
SPEAKER_3: And part of that resilience is you have to be willing to override your associate editors and accept papers when they do not like them.
SPEAKER_2: And vice versa.
SPEAKER_2: Reject papers that people seem to be giving passes to.
SPEAKER_1: I would frame this slightly differently.
SPEAKER_1: I was just like, this come, you are accepting, you need to be aware that you have whole tremendous powers over the careers and lives of individuals.
SPEAKER_1: And that power is great.
SPEAKER_1: But there's very high stakes.
SPEAKER_1: And in any high stakes system, there's got to be consequences.
SPEAKER_1: Not just for the people that you dole out your decisions, but that might backfire.
SPEAKER_1: So I think that's it.
SPEAKER_1: I was acutely aware that I once rejected a paper by someone that didn't get tenure, tried to get a new job.
SPEAKER_1: And this was an important paper.
SPEAKER_1: The person had two newborns that just bought a house.
SPEAKER_1: These decisions can have material consequences on people's lives.
SPEAKER_1: Sometimes it's just a PDF, but of course it's not.
SPEAKER_1: So for people, this could be job security.
SPEAKER_1: This could be the new job that they're getting.
SPEAKER_1: That could be the tenure.
SPEAKER_1: It could be the promotion.
SPEAKER_1: It could be the mortgage.
SPEAKER_1: I had a situation where they had a marital crisis because of freaking papers.
SPEAKER_1: So, you know, high stakes.
SPEAKER_2: All right, so you're 100% right.
SPEAKER_2: You're 100% right and you're a good man, Recker.
SPEAKER_2: And thinking that way as a steward of your field and a steward of other people's careers is beautiful.
SPEAKER_2: It's the way to think, but you still have your integrity and you're still holding the high standards.
SPEAKER_2: Now, with that said, I've heard multiple times in the last decade, people who are upset with their editor because they won a couple of rounds.
SPEAKER_2: They really needed that paper for promotion and they didn't get the promotion.
SPEAKER_2: So there have been actually people who went up for tenure or something like that.
SPEAKER_2: They didn't get the promotion.
SPEAKER_2: And it's because that one paper was rejected after two rounds or something like that.
SPEAKER_2: And they are upset to this day with the senior editor.
SPEAKER_2: And to those people, I would say, well, maybe the senior editor wasn't perfect.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe the senior editor, and I think it's the senior editor, is criminal if the senior editor waited a very long time between rounds.
SPEAKER_2: And that was their only, you know.
SPEAKER_2: But I actually think it's the author's fault for relying on one paper.
SPEAKER_2: We know that our great papers get rejected.
SPEAKER_2: I have many great papers that got rejected at top journals.
SPEAKER_2: That my Escalation paper from a few years back in JMIS, that was rejected at MISQ, it was rejected at ISR, it's in JMIS.
SPEAKER_2: I'm very proud of that paper.
SPEAKER_2: It's an excellent paper.
SPEAKER_2: We should know that our papers get rejected.
SPEAKER_2: That's what they do.
SPEAKER_2: They get rejected in second round.
SPEAKER_2: I think that paper I'm talking about went three rounds, I think, at MISQ before it was rejected.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not mad at the senior editor.
SPEAKER_2: I know that senior editors doing whatever it is they do, and they rejected me.
SPEAKER_2: It's a game you're in.
SPEAKER_2: If your whole career hinges on one paper, you're not managing your career right.
SPEAKER_2: You need multiple papers.
SPEAKER_2: That's the game we're in.
SPEAKER_2: Assume two out of three are going to be rejected at some point in the process.
SPEAKER_2: We can't place too much on one paper if we're authors, or else you're not managing your career.
SPEAKER_2: Does this make sense?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I think you're right.
SPEAKER_3: But I also think, because look, we're supposed to launch many ships.
SPEAKER_3: We don't know which one will come back in.
SPEAKER_3: Right?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, this is just like being a trader, the tea market at one point in time.
SPEAKER_3: You send a bunch of ships around the Cape of Africa.
SPEAKER_3: If one in three came back, you're happy.
SPEAKER_3: Right?
SPEAKER_3: And that's how you have to look at it pre-tenure.
SPEAKER_3: That's why I tell my students, you need six good papers.
SPEAKER_3: And if two or three of them hit, you'll be okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, depending on what your tenure criteria are at your university.
SPEAKER_3: With this in general, as they leave, I expect them to keep working after they leave campus.
SPEAKER_3: Right?
SPEAKER_3: But as you leave campus, you need six good ideas, which is a big number, I think, for someone to come up with in four years.
SPEAKER_3: But I also think, Nick, that there's a power here we're not talking about, that I think is also an essential skill of a good editor.
SPEAKER_3: They have to admit when they're wrong.
SPEAKER_3: And I've had this happen a couple of times, and it's pretty rare.
SPEAKER_3: Well, let's say, you know, in the last round, we asked you to do this, and actually, the paper from the last round was better than what we asked you to do.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_2: I've never had that.
SPEAKER_3: And I've actually had them reel it back.
SPEAKER_3: I've had it.
SPEAKER_3: It's really rare.
SPEAKER_3: But I'm not going to drop names because they probably wouldn't be real happy if I said their names.
SPEAKER_3: But I really respect those people.
SPEAKER_3: They go, yeah, you know, we asked you to do a bunch of this analysis.
SPEAKER_3: And I've got one that we just submitted has a 200-page appendix because they made a front 1500 analyses.
SPEAKER_3: And the SE is like, yeah, that was really not a very good idea.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: And I really think it's important when you've got, when you have senior editors that are willing to go, you know what?
SPEAKER_3: I made a mistake.
SPEAKER_3: And I actually, I actually made a mistake recently.
SPEAKER_3: I had a paper at the, it got re-assigned to a new AE for various reasons.
SPEAKER_3: I lost track of it and it sat for a long time.
SPEAKER_3: And I had to write to the authors of a heartfelt apology saying, look, this is my fault.
SPEAKER_3: I'm so sorry.
SPEAKER_3: And I will do whatever I can to get to a swift decision in the next round.
SPEAKER_3: And I think that's an editorial superpower.
SPEAKER_3: More editors should take R because we are not perfect.
SPEAKER_3: We are fallible.
SPEAKER_3: Our AEs make mistakes.
SPEAKER_3: Our authors make mistakes.
SPEAKER_3: When authors send me queries and they say, you know, this reviewer is not right, or this review looks like it was done by GPT.
SPEAKER_3: And I have to go back and go through the whole package again and go, oh my God, they're right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And then I have to issue a new SE letter saying, or we do it between us and it comes back, comes back appended to the revision and say, yeah, you know, reviewer three, I'm not so sure about.
SPEAKER_3: Let's ignore it.
SPEAKER_3: 1.12345.
SPEAKER_3: Just do this.
SPEAKER_3: And I think, I think more editors need to do that.
SPEAKER_2: Yep.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I don't ever...
SPEAKER_2: So I've had is an author where I follow editorial advice and it's like round three is a really nice paper that I'm proud of.
SPEAKER_2: And then they ask me to do things and it makes the paper worse.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And then I've published papers that are...
SPEAKER_2: And I'm an author and I'm knowingly know that they're worse than they were around or two ago.
SPEAKER_2: Or I've actually gotten paper rejected for doing that.
SPEAKER_2: But yeah, I've never had an editor come back and say, no, I was wrong to do this.
SPEAKER_2: Recker, you did?
SPEAKER_2: You had an editor tell you?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I had a situation like what Jason said, where we said like, hey, do this and this and this.
SPEAKER_1: In the next one, we said, like, look, whatever we suggested, that just didn't work and we have to roll it back.
SPEAKER_1: And I...
SPEAKER_1: But I never felt that to be honest, I never felt that to be a big thing or a big superpower.
SPEAKER_1: I was like, well, that didn't work.
SPEAKER_1: Let's try something else, you know?
SPEAKER_1: So it's kind of felt a little bit more natural.
SPEAKER_3: But Nick's never had it happen, shows you the rareness of it, right?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I think the broader issue there is this hierarchy that we're building up on that people have in their mind that the editor is up here and the authors are the plea bargainer down here.
SPEAKER_1: So why would you go down to the peasants and say, I'm sorry for anything, right?
SPEAKER_1: And there is this implicit hierarchy thing that I am on my throne and I'm deciding upon your fate.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, in that situation, of course, you wouldn't say sorry for anything, right?
SPEAKER_1: So I think that's the bigger problem.
SPEAKER_1: Part of that is, I hadn't written it down, but I'll say it anyway, is editor, just talk to your authors, please.
SPEAKER_1: Let them know what's going on.
SPEAKER_1: Don't just rely on the ScholarOne system notifications.
SPEAKER_1: If it's taking four months or whatever, just write a freaking email saying, hey, guys, I just wanted to update you on the situation.
SPEAKER_1: We had one reviewer that said he would do it and they didn't do it, so I had to find someone else.
SPEAKER_1: This is what's going on.
SPEAKER_1: This is when you can expect to hear from me.
SPEAKER_1: Just stay in touch with people and don't be sitting on your throne, annoyed if people ask you what's going on.
SPEAKER_2: So this is what I heard from you, Recker, is that the editor is up here on a pedestal, and the reviewers are unassailable, and the little bitch authors have to do whatever they say, and they have to go through and please and please and please, no matter how ridiculous the, I mean, I have a revision right now, where I frankly think the one reviewer is really, at this point, unreasonable and foolish.
SPEAKER_2: But this must be a senior person or something because they keep, and the editor, the AE and the SE keep saying, well, reviewer one or whatever is a really well-respected person.
SPEAKER_2: You have to please them for all this kind of shit.
SPEAKER_2: What I think as an editor, you have to do is not just advocate for the authors, but equip the authors with the strat, this is kind of fits path to publication, but it's this power dynamic that you're mentioning.
SPEAKER_2: You have to help your authors deal with even those senior most reviewers, so that they can use you as an editor to argue with that.
SPEAKER_2: Because here's the problem, if they argue with the reviewer without your backing as the editor, then the reviewer just oftentimes entrenches themselves, they get a little bit petulant, they feel like they're being disrespected, and they get angry and they're allowed to.
SPEAKER_2: If however, the senior editor says, deal with this comment this way.
SPEAKER_2: Now, when you go back to that reviewer, you can say, well, we followed what the senior editor said to address your comment and we did this.
SPEAKER_2: And boom, you've just armed your authors with a reasonable way to deal with the review process.
SPEAKER_2: That to me is the best thing an editor can do for their authors, is advocate for their authors and equip their authors with a way of dealing.
SPEAKER_2: And frankly, I think they always take the reviewer's side.
SPEAKER_2: It would be nice to see some more editors take the author's side in discussions with reviewers.
SPEAKER_1: Nick, Jason, I'm going on a little segway here.
SPEAKER_1: As I'm listening to all three of us, it sounds like we're the most author-friendly, positive editors we're accepting every single paper there is.
SPEAKER_1: This is a little bit of what it comes across.
SPEAKER_1: So I wanted to ask you, my acceptance statistics, I'm pretty sure I'm actually lower than the average.
SPEAKER_1: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_1: I certainly don't accept more paper than other editors.
SPEAKER_1: If the regular thing is, well, whatever, 7%, I don't think I get to 7%.
SPEAKER_1: So do you accept a lot of papers?
SPEAKER_1: Because I frankly don't.
SPEAKER_1: But that doesn't mean that you're accepting everything that comes your way.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know if I reject more or less than the average, but no, I reject way more than I give revisions to or accept.
SPEAKER_2: As a matter of fact, I just reject a lot.
SPEAKER_2: But I'm talking about for those papers that I have in a couple of rounds, that I want to publish.
SPEAKER_3: I don't track it, honestly.
SPEAKER_3: When I finished my first term at MIS Quarterly, I know I was higher than average, but it wasn't an incredibly higher than average number, because I asked Jan to grow specs and I'm like, how do you compare to everyone else?
SPEAKER_3: She's like, you helped the journal because you accepted papers.
SPEAKER_3: I thought about that a lot actually after my term ended.
SPEAKER_3: Because a lot of editors I know take a lot of pride and I was really tough, I had a low acceptance rate.
SPEAKER_3: I see that as a fundamental failure.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not taking a shot at you, Jan, let me be very clear.
SPEAKER_3: I think you have to kind of, because I know some people that keep spreadsheets, and they track their accept or reject rates.
SPEAKER_1: I do that.
SPEAKER_3: I think it depends on how you use the spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_3: It's great if it helps you manage the process.
SPEAKER_3: It's bad if you're using a tracker.
SPEAKER_1: I don't do that, but I have three SE positions at the moment.
SPEAKER_1: I just need to keep track of where my papers are at.
SPEAKER_3: That's a perfectly great way to do it.
SPEAKER_3: But if you're using it to count, like keep a running tally of your percentage of accepts, that's not a very healthy way to use the dashboard, right?
SPEAKER_3: To me, the bar for being a good editor is, I do reject a lot of papers and I'm more apt to reject in the first two rounds than after that.
SPEAKER_3: But I don't pay attention to that number at all.
SPEAKER_3: I pay attention to the question of am I accepting interesting papers or am I rejecting papers I think are interesting?
SPEAKER_2: What you said is something I'm trying to embrace that ABJ told me once and it resonates with what you're saying.
SPEAKER_2: He said, we're not in the business of rejecting papers, we're in the business of publishing papers.
SPEAKER_2: If senior editors would think that, and this is what I do, and I know I've told Recker this in the past, but what I do as an editor is I desk reject papers that I know I'm going to reject so that I save reviewers time.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not going to waste valuable reviewers to reject my paper with me.
SPEAKER_2: Now, usually, I'll involve the AE because I'll send it to an AE and be like, do you see anything I don't?
SPEAKER_2: Because I think this is a clear desk reject.
SPEAKER_2: That's the first move.
SPEAKER_2: Second is desk revision, which is, well, do I think I can publish this paper?
SPEAKER_2: I don't know, but I see some glaring issues.
SPEAKER_2: Well, again, before I use reviewer time, I will do a desk revision just to take care of some of the big issues.
SPEAKER_2: So desk reject, desk revision, I will do with most papers.
SPEAKER_2: If I send to review, the only papers I send to review are the ones that I think I can publish.
SPEAKER_2: Now, then the reviewers look at it and they turn around and tell me why I can't publish it.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe sometimes they point out some glaring weaknesses that I didn't see or the agency.
SPEAKER_2: But by the time I'm using reviewers, I think I can publish it.
SPEAKER_2: If I go around and maybe I give them one revision or something to see if it will clean up, after that, after two rounds with reviewers, I know whether I'm publishing the paper or not.
SPEAKER_2: If I'm going to publish the paper, then I figure out a way to get it published.
SPEAKER_2: If I'm not, then I have to stop it.
SPEAKER_1: I want to jump in here because this is one of my rules and I know Nick will hate it.
SPEAKER_1: I do almost the same thing as Nick, except I hate disk revisions.
SPEAKER_1: I've tried this a few times and I don't think it works at all.
SPEAKER_1: Really?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: As an editorial desk revision, hi, here please do these five things or whatever and then we'll get it in shape for the review process.
SPEAKER_1: The problem that I see is that I am not in a position that I can give any commitment to the authors.
SPEAKER_1: It's a lot of work for the authors and it may or may not actually pay out in the long run.
SPEAKER_1: I've tried it a couple of times and in fact, Chase, now you won.
SPEAKER_1: Did you not won?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I did.
SPEAKER_1: I was like, I don't think that was a good idea in hindsight.
SPEAKER_1: Because frankly, the game starts after that.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not doing that anymore.
SPEAKER_1: I don't like the desk revision.
SPEAKER_1: I do the desk reject and papers that get into the review process.
SPEAKER_1: I do see a potential of that being published.
SPEAKER_2: What if you see a big thing that's pretty obvious and pretty clear that the reviewer is going to beat them up on this big thing?
SPEAKER_2: Why would you send a review if you see the big obvious thing?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I think there's different kinds of obvious things.
SPEAKER_1: There's the obvious glaring, this is never going to work because the design is flawed, kind of thing, then it's a reject.
SPEAKER_1: What can I say?
SPEAKER_1: Look, the experiment is flawed in a story.
SPEAKER_1: May as well reject it.
SPEAKER_1: Then there are the obvious mistakes that reviewers will jump upon, which may or may not be deal-breakers.
SPEAKER_1: Now, I know that the reviewers will comment on your use of affordance theory or whatever, or your sloppy use of social materiality, fine, or you call it interpretive.
SPEAKER_2: But I think the desk revision is more like the former.
SPEAKER_2: I would have to reject this paper, but because there's a glaring weakness.
SPEAKER_2: This is probably a clear reject, but I see they have cool data.
SPEAKER_1: I think there are glaring weaknesses that are fixable, and there are glaring weaknesses that are not fixable.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, but let's say it's not fixable.
SPEAKER_2: I'd be like desk revision, you go back, do another experiment.
SPEAKER_2: You go back, collect some more data.
SPEAKER_2: Just handle the big thing, and then you could-
SPEAKER_1: I would never do a desk revision, say like, hey, buddy, yeah, maybe, but you need to do a new experiment, and then send it to me again.
SPEAKER_1: That feels like the good old reject and resubmit, which was a weak way out without any commitment, and it left authors with the, should we or should we not do this enormous amount of work?
SPEAKER_1: Just to reset, go to zero, go to start, don't get 200 bucks, start the game over.
SPEAKER_1: So, I just don't like it.
SPEAKER_1: I know I have done it, but I'm not doing it.
SPEAKER_3: I'm a lot of the on on this.
SPEAKER_3: And the reason I don't like it, and I'm not speaking from the author side, because I always like being left in the game as an author, but as a senior editor, when I reject a paper that's been through a text revision, you know, there's a real sense of psychological contract breach that comes back from the authors.
SPEAKER_3: Like the next time I see them and whatnot.
SPEAKER_3: And it's great because I put them through a lot of extra effort to sometimes write a paper that's not exactly aligned with what they wanted to say, unknowingly.
SPEAKER_3: And then to send it out for review and all the reviewers come back and say, hey, you know, yeah, there's a random review.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't participate in it because I've had reviewers say this.
SPEAKER_3: And then say, forget it, we don't want it.
SPEAKER_3: And that's a really bitter feeling of, I did the work, I worked really hard to make this better, and I still didn't get a proper revision.
SPEAKER_3: Like I would much rather say, you know what, I'm rejecting the paper.
SPEAKER_3: If you want to write a completely new paper and do it as a completely new submission, which is not a reject and resubmit, that's a different beast entirely.
SPEAKER_3: I would rather get that than get a desk revision that leads nowhere.
SPEAKER_2: Hmm.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_2: So this is what, so you guys have inspired me.
SPEAKER_2: The thing that I think I'm doing is two things.
SPEAKER_2: One, keeping, giving some authors who are doing something interesting to remain in the game instead of just getting rejected, and not using up valuable reviewers who are overwhelmed with reviews anyway if they're any good.
SPEAKER_2: So that's what I think I'm doing.
SPEAKER_2: Now, if I go back and look at the last, I don't know how many years of desk revisions that I've done, I'm going to look at them.
SPEAKER_2: I'm going to see how many I've actually published or are in the road to publication, and how many I end up rejecting.
SPEAKER_2: If I end up rejecting all these desk revisions, then maybe desk revisions are a bad idea.
SPEAKER_2: If I end up seeing them through, then maybe I'm doing a good job.
SPEAKER_3: I think there's one time that I think you should do a desk revision, and that's when you're really committed to publishing the paper.
SPEAKER_3: The paper comes back and it's the beginning of, say, the second round, and they say early career authors, and they've just missed the boat on something.
SPEAKER_3: Most of the paper is fine, but there's a bit of analysis that if they just tweak that in, maybe people could see the value in their work.
SPEAKER_3: I can see doing a desk revision at that point, but you as a senior editor really have to commit to that author team.
SPEAKER_3: That's aren't you.
SPEAKER_3: To me, that's something I don't see enough senior editors doing.
SPEAKER_3: I'm seeing way too much vote counting.
SPEAKER_3: I'm seeing, and now everyone in the field is going to hate me, but I see a lot of vote counting going on.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not sure always that senior editors are reading the full review package.
SPEAKER_1: Or the full paper, for that matter.
SPEAKER_3: Pardon?
SPEAKER_1: Or the full paper, for that matter.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, or the full paper, and that really bothers me.
SPEAKER_3: And so I don't mind if I'm a little bit late sometimes, if I have to sit back and make that decision.
SPEAKER_3: You know, the other thing that I think is that, and we haven't talked about enough, is this overwriting everyone else.
SPEAKER_3: Like I really, and I haven't done it very often in my career, but sometimes I get these review packages back.
SPEAKER_3: And to me, the S, and I haven't done my job as an SE, because the AE writes a report which I see as small.
SPEAKER_3: And then I have three reviewers writing reviews that focus on small things, and they're not seeing the big picture of the paper.
SPEAKER_3: And what's the hardest part with that when you write that overwriting decision, because the reviewers go out and say, hey, that paper was cooked, because I've had complaints lodged against me before.
SPEAKER_3: And they'll be like, yeah, this guy's favoring this guy.
SPEAKER_3: And I'm like, oh, I know them.
SPEAKER_3: I've never met these people.
SPEAKER_3: I just think the idea is interesting, right?
SPEAKER_3: But the hard part with that, when you write that overwriting review, it's when you have to do that.
SPEAKER_3: And that takes courage, which you talked about earlier, but too, you have to manage the review team so that all those people don't quit sending reviews.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And that's something that we don't train people on.
SPEAKER_2: If you publish something rigorous and that meets the strictest criteria for rigor, no one's going to complain.
SPEAKER_2: If, however, you're like, I like this paper, it's kind of cool.
SPEAKER_2: And maybe, you know, it's conceptual, which people can always criticize.
SPEAKER_2: Or maybe it's got a couple of flaws in the data set or something, but you just think it's cool.
SPEAKER_2: So you're going to go ahead and publish it.
SPEAKER_2: The thing is, when you talk about courage, that's the thing that they're going to be like, oh, they're playing favorites or they must have known that or something.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe it's like, no, I'm just trying to not admit it.
SPEAKER_1: Is that really happening?
SPEAKER_1: All this bad mouthing?
SPEAKER_1: I think, oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: You're a German chair.
SPEAKER_3: You're like a Lord of the Realm.
SPEAKER_3: I am a Lord of the Realm.
SPEAKER_3: The rest of us that live in the weeds.
SPEAKER_3: Nick's an administrator now.
SPEAKER_3: Everyone bad mounts administrators.
SPEAKER_3: You know, and for whatever, I'm fat.
SPEAKER_3: People pick on fat people.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, you know, I mean, people do sit around and especially, you know, Jan, we don't really roll with the crowd because we're not young, but the young people do compare notes.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, of course they do.
SPEAKER_3: And they all talk to each other and they're all trying to figure out which senior editors are more reasonable and less reasonable.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, and reviewers do complain.
SPEAKER_3: If you want that, get Sue or Ramona Deeper or Super on the call and ask them, like, top five dumb things reviewers have done in their process.
SPEAKER_3: That would be a really interesting call.
SPEAKER_3: I doubt any of them would complain about that.
SPEAKER_2: What are top dumb things that reviewers have done?
SPEAKER_2: What have you guys seen?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, of course, the worst is Chant GPT or just doing it.
SPEAKER_3: Now you're stirring a pot.
SPEAKER_3: You know what I think it is?
SPEAKER_3: It's when they apply their own worldview of methods to assess a method the wrong way.
SPEAKER_3: Like when I get people applying econometric heuristics to experiments, they're like, well, you didn't establish causality.
SPEAKER_3: The manipulation worked.
SPEAKER_3: I can show you the causality.
SPEAKER_3: That's like such a pet peeve of mine.
SPEAKER_1: The third bad thing they do is to cite me, myself, and I.
SPEAKER_1: Like, oh, you missed these seven papers and they all have my name in them.
SPEAKER_1: That's how reviewers do that a lot.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Speaking of that, I did a decision not long ago where they missed one of my papers.
SPEAKER_3: In the final decision letter, I said, look, you don't have to cite my paper, but just so you know, here's this reference that you missed.
SPEAKER_3: You can decide if you include it or not.
SPEAKER_3: After the decision was made, because I didn't want to put the authors in the position of feeling like they had to cite my stuff, I put it at their discretion.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, I see authors do that one.
SPEAKER_3: Then the other one is where they basically re-outline the whole paper.
SPEAKER_3: This doesn't tell the story I want.
SPEAKER_3: I've had that line in a review package once.
SPEAKER_3: All right.
SPEAKER_2: I've taken a lot of notes.
SPEAKER_2: I think we have way too many rules.
SPEAKER_2: Are there any that we missed?
SPEAKER_2: Either of you have burning in your crop?
SPEAKER_1: Just a final one.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know whether you guys agree.
SPEAKER_1: But I always think there is a tension between being developmental and constructive.
SPEAKER_1: If you have to err on one of these sides, then err on the side of constructive, not developmental.
SPEAKER_1: Nick, we talked about this.
SPEAKER_1: I think we are over-applying the developmental reviewing card.
SPEAKER_1: We are developing and developing and developing.
SPEAKER_1: It actually has a lot of bad consequences.
SPEAKER_1: One obvious one is that we don't get actually mature papers.
SPEAKER_1: We get underdeveloped papers to begin with because everyone is developing them in the review process.
SPEAKER_1: I'd like us to be more in a field where like here is a finished study with a good paper.
SPEAKER_1: Now, they could criticize it.
SPEAKER_1: There might be flaws with it, but let me know whether you can publish this or not.
SPEAKER_1: Like the nature model, like publish it or not and move away from here's the fragments or the basis of a paper that could potentially in three to four years become a real paper.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: So if you have to decide between being developmental and constructive, be constructive.
SPEAKER_1: Like tell me what the problem is.
SPEAKER_1: Tell what might do about it, but don't develop the paper into something else.
SPEAKER_1: I just don't like that very much.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I think there's one comment I'd make and it's not at the senior editor level, it's the EIC level.
SPEAKER_3: I don't think EICs are transparent enough about the workload of senior editors.
SPEAKER_3: I think authors sometimes expect really fast decisions because they don't know that the senior editor is handling 10 to 15 papers at a time.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And I think that there needs to be, I think the EICs can do a little better job of making people aware of what senior editors do, how they do it.
SPEAKER_3: And this isn't a shot at any particular journal.
SPEAKER_3: But I hear a lot of misunderstandings when I do talk to young people about how the process unfolds.
SPEAKER_3: And senior editors can do a better job of communicating that as they go out and they give talks or then they meet with young people.
SPEAKER_3: Then the other thing I would suggest, and I know we're over time, so I apologize.
SPEAKER_3: I think that the senior editors need to be more responsible for helping AEs become better AEs.
SPEAKER_3: And I think we should actually be more responsible for helping reviewers become better reviewers.
SPEAKER_3: It's easy for me to complain like, hey, this looks like ChatGPT.
SPEAKER_3: But it's better that I follow up with a kid and I go, hey, I appreciate that you reviewed.
SPEAKER_3: But there's some things here where you could do a better job of writing it in your own voice, which is a nice way of saying I know.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, you're right.
SPEAKER_2: So as leaders and stewards of it, we should be nurturing AEs and reviewers.
SPEAKER_2: I've tried to do that with AEs.
SPEAKER_2: Some are responsive, some actively seek feedback, like how was my report then?
SPEAKER_2: Others, when I tried to tweak something that they're saying, they've gotten upset.
SPEAKER_2: They're like, no, I think it's fine the way I wrote it.
SPEAKER_2: So I've gotten that too.
SPEAKER_2: So there are different types, but you're right.
SPEAKER_3: Do you use that AE again?
SPEAKER_3: I don't use the AEs that say that.
SPEAKER_3: The ones that don't respond to feedback, I'm like, okay.
SPEAKER_3: Good luck.
SPEAKER_1: One simple and nice mechanism you could use is if you write an unsolicited email, not someone asking how was I, and then you tell them how good or bad they were, but rather if it's a good job, just out of the blue, send them an email saying, hey, this was great.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason for that is an unsolicited email is a nice thing to put into your promotion and tenure packages.
SPEAKER_1: So like, hey, here is someone unpromptedly giving me compliments or whatever, giving me feedback on my work, saying how good a job that is.
SPEAKER_1: And I know it counts more if it's not solicited.
SPEAKER_1: So I'm not asking you how good I was, but if you tell me out of your own good, that I've just done a good job as a reviewer, or as an AE, or whatever.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so I think that's a nice thing we can do.
SPEAKER_3: So one thing I do that I don't do too often, and this will be my final comment I promise, is I send the reviewers that I overwrite a note thanking them for their service and letting them know I actually do care about their opinion.
SPEAKER_1: That's nice.
SPEAKER_3: Because those are-
SPEAKER_1: I've never done that.
SPEAKER_3: Pardon?
SPEAKER_1: I don't think I've ever done that.
SPEAKER_3: I think it's really important because they gave their time.
SPEAKER_3: Then you have this senior person who's like emperor of the world saying, hey, your idea sucks.
SPEAKER_3: It's not that I disagree with them entirely.
SPEAKER_3: I do use some of their points, but I want them to stay engaged in the process and know their value.
SPEAKER_3: It's just we don't happen to agree on this one paper.
SPEAKER_3: And some of those negative reviewers I've used consistently over time, and I've watched them get better when they get feedback that their opinions matter.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's cool.
SPEAKER_2: That's a good idea.
SPEAKER_2: I've never done that.
SPEAKER_2: All right, Recker, we have this long list, dude.
SPEAKER_1: I know.
SPEAKER_1: And I do three of them.
SPEAKER_1: One of the 12 things I should be doing, I'm probably doing three.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the nice thing is, of the bunch of things that I had, we addressed everything in some form or another.
SPEAKER_2: So I like it.
SPEAKER_1: So let me just finish by saying, I don't think it's a good idea if everyone adopts all of these 12 principles or whatever.
SPEAKER_1: I do think we need different editors doing things differently and seeing the world differently and accepting different kind of papers.
SPEAKER_1: I think the worst situation is if we only had a whole bunch of Jans on the boards because then we would miss out a lot of papers that I just wouldn't accept.
SPEAKER_1: And I'm sure it's the same way for you and for everybody else.
SPEAKER_1: That was one of the big learnings when we did the managing especially issue where we had very different editors, like Bin Gu was a very different person from us, Radhika was different from us, and they look for different things in papers and they cherish different kinds of papers and everything.
SPEAKER_1: And I was thinking, well, it's a good thing that we have different people doing this, that it's not a journal or one editor, it's a whole bunch of different people.
SPEAKER_1: I know it makes it difficult because it's kind of like a lottery, except, of course, that it's not.
SPEAKER_1: It's not a lottery.
SPEAKER_1: It's not random chance.
SPEAKER_1: Authors pick the editors, and in the most cases, except for the intransparent workload, usually they get their preferred editors.
SPEAKER_1: And Jason said the transparency is missing.
SPEAKER_1: True.
SPEAKER_1: So sometimes you don't get your senior editor.
SPEAKER_1: In 90% of these cases, it's because they have too many papers on.
SPEAKER_1: In 10% of the cases, it's because there's a conflict of interest actually perceived that the authors did no fail to disclose whatever else.
SPEAKER_1: These are the two main reasons why you don't get the editors that you want.
SPEAKER_1: But it's not because it's a lottery, someone plays some weird game or anything like that.
SPEAKER_1: It really, this is usually what it comes down to.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I 100% agree.
SPEAKER_3: I think there's far less manipulation of the peer review process than people suspect.
SPEAKER_3: You know, a lot of this is just EIC surviving and SE surviving because it's a wild ride.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And all the myth and the urban legends and all these stories, we've all heard them.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, there are Bad Apples and Bad Apple stories out there.
SPEAKER_1: But if you count them up, the fraction of that, I would even say, I think I said that one, I think we're doing better than many other fields that have more pressure, like big economics.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, I think economics is a lot harsher than IS.
SPEAKER_1: And, you know, so I think we're doing okay.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, this was fun.
SPEAKER_2: And I like your point at the end.
SPEAKER_2: So we had a bunch of giving our views on these things, but, you know, not everyone will agree with us.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that you're right.
SPEAKER_2: That's a good idea.
SPEAKER_2: We need to keep the diverse.
SPEAKER_2: We don't want to be a homogenous set of doing the exact same thing.
SPEAKER_1: No, definitely.
SPEAKER_1: And I also remember one point that we were you.
SPEAKER_1: Nick, you once told the story of an editor where you handled a paper and you were really proud of how you handled it as an editor and you accepted the paper.
SPEAKER_1: And then later you learned the authors hated you.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, you didn't hear this story.
SPEAKER_2: I was an AE at the time and the paper got published.
SPEAKER_2: And I thought, I mean, it should have been a reject in the first round, clearly.
SPEAKER_2: So I really worked hard to get them every part of it.
SPEAKER_2: And with the review, we crafted it and it's a good paper.
SPEAKER_2: It's published now.
SPEAKER_2: And I feel like, wow, here I took a paper that would have been rejected by any other AE and I got it shaped up to be published in a great journal.
SPEAKER_2: And then I found out years later that the authors of this paper were very upset with me for making me do a whole bunch of unnecessary things, not getting their paper, doing a bunch of, and just really creating a painful process to get published.
SPEAKER_3: Were they upset after you accepted it?
SPEAKER_3: Suggested accepting it?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, years later, I was like, that guy was an asshole.
SPEAKER_2: Meaning I was an asshole.
SPEAKER_3: Wow, I'm angry during the process because I'm an angry person.
SPEAKER_3: But once it's done, it's like all wine and roses.
SPEAKER_3: It's like, oh, I'm so thankful.
SPEAKER_2: That's how I am too.
SPEAKER_2: I know what it's like to deal with these.
SPEAKER_2: And I got through the finish line.
SPEAKER_2: I love everyone.
SPEAKER_2: It's like, hell, when I get rejected, even if I think it's unreasonable why I got rejected, I'm still like, hey, I get it.
SPEAKER_2: I'm on the other side half the time.
SPEAKER_2: And it's like, they have a world view.
SPEAKER_2: They have certain things they were expecting.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't deliver.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I disagree, but I got to reject it.
SPEAKER_2: I get it.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not going to be upset at anybody, but no, there are times, I get that, I think especially inexperienced people who don't see the editorial side from the inside, or they really resent the decisions that are made.
SPEAKER_2: Like I know people blaming editors for rejecting them at a certain point and they don't see that their editor on the inside was trying to really give them a chance, give them a chance, and then they just never fulfilled the chance.
SPEAKER_2: So the editor's thinking that they keep giving the person a chance.
SPEAKER_2: I saw, I wasn't the editor on this one, but I saw it from a reviewer process where the editor, everyone else was rejecting it, but the editor kept trying to give them a chance.
SPEAKER_2: And then at the end, it just wasn't going to happen, and so they had to reject.
SPEAKER_2: And the authors were not happy.
SPEAKER_2: So I think, sure, I'm sad when I get a rejection.
SPEAKER_2: I get plenty of rejections.
SPEAKER_2: This is the other myth.
SPEAKER_2: You look at someone like Jason Thatcher or Jan Recker, you guys, we all of us publish a pretty good amount.
SPEAKER_1: You don't see the rejection.
SPEAKER_2: How many rejections do you get per acceptance, would you say?
SPEAKER_2: What's the ratio?
SPEAKER_3: I'm not going first.
SPEAKER_1: I don't have the stats, but I got a few ones recently.
SPEAKER_1: I'm probably like two to one.
SPEAKER_2: So for every three top tier papers I submit first round, I probably get one in.
SPEAKER_2: Then the others, I'll get revisions and whatever, I have to go to another journal.
SPEAKER_2: Eventually, they get in somewhere.
SPEAKER_2: But first thing, I probably get one out of three.
SPEAKER_3: One out of three, that's really high.
SPEAKER_3: Once again, you're Superman.
SPEAKER_3: Mine's maybe 20 percent.
SPEAKER_3: But I work with a lot of early career people, and it's a developmental process.
SPEAKER_3: So if I can get one in three with one of my PhD students out of the three essays, I'm pretty happy.
SPEAKER_3: Then if I work with international students because they're trained differently, and it's a developmental process, eventually they all find homes.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, eventually it's three out of three.
SPEAKER_2: But I'm thinking that first journal you submit to, you submit three papers to MISQ, one will get published in MISQ eventually.
SPEAKER_3: My first submission is always MISQ or ISR.
SPEAKER_1: Mine are there, and that's the big difference.
SPEAKER_3: Go do the math on my CV.
SPEAKER_3: That will give you my hit rate.
SPEAKER_3: I actually don't know what I'll do.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, if it shows up somewhere else, once in a while, I'll write one specifically targeted to a special issue.
SPEAKER_3: But the way I was trained was you always aim for the top, and then you work your way down.
SPEAKER_3: If it's not worth chasing the top paper, unless it's like a method piece or lit review piece, which I'm writing so I can write a top paper, those real original contributions usually start at the quarterly, which usually ends in a rejection.
SPEAKER_1: Gentlemen, we need to stop here.
SPEAKER_1: No one's listening to us anymore.
SPEAKER_1: I'm pretty sure that all the listeners have gone off and made some curry or something, whatever people do.
SPEAKER_2: In 40 minutes, right?
SPEAKER_2: That's the time limit.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, we're twice on that.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe we'll probably do it in two episodes.
SPEAKER_1: Jason, this was awesome.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks so much for preparing and coming on again and sharing your insights.
SPEAKER_1: That's awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Anytime.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you.
SPEAKER_2: It was fun.
SPEAKER_2: Talk soon.
SPEAKER_1: Bye-bye.