The former executive editor of Review of Financial Studies Matthew Spiegel argued that “No published article is good enough to publish” (Spiegel (2012)).   I agree with him.  In my opinion, a journal serves the purpose of disseminating knowledge by publishing articles that contain new knowledge created by researchers.  To save our readers’ precious time, the peer review process serves as a screening mechanism.   To ensure each published article is “perfect,”  the review team spends a lot of time on making various improvement suggestions.  Unless there is a clear direction provided by the review team, some authors may abandon the process with disappointments.

Knowing no paper is perfect and no review process is ideal, I would reduce the number of review cycles and reduce the default number of required reviewers so as to attract more high quality submissions to M&SOM.  M&SOM takes pride in providing high quality reviews with short cycle times.  However, there is an opportunity for us to reduce the number of review cycles. Some reviewers are perfectionists who come up with additional demands during each review cycle.  There are occasions that certain demands do not seem to change the results or insights much; however, these demands can take up a lot of time for the author(s) to address.  To maximize the “return on investment of everyone’s time,” I shall work closely with the Associate Editors to make conscious decisions that can reduce the number of review cycles so that each submission will be accepted (or rejected) “in principle” after no more than two review cycles.   Also, I would like to reduce the default number of required reviewers from three to two.

We welcome your high quality submissions!

Reference

Spiegel, M., “Reviewing Less – Progressing More,” Review of Financial Studies, vol. 25, 5, pp. 1331-1338, 2012.