What do you think about this?
Publishing in a journal that you are the editor of.
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I ask my 6 year old son to write a referee report on my paper. That's enough for me.
I do it all the time and pretend it did not happen.
How does it feel when you send yourself a decision letter? Do you say "f**k off those referees, they want me to re-write the paper!"? -
No I don't say that. I send referee reports to my besties and sometimes they submit their paper to my journal as well. Then, I send their papers to their besties.
I do it all the time and pretend it did not happen.
How does it feel when you send yourself a decision letter? Do you say "f**k off those referees, they want me to re-write the paper!"? -
This is pretty common at journals with co-editors. You just make sure that one of the other co-editors handles the paper. No big deal.
Obviously, though, it's a problem at a journal with only one editor.Ever hear of a guest editor? Clearly not.
The bigger problem is that the refereeing incentives are ALL SCREWED UP. The likelihood that the editor will know the identity of the referee is near one, so few referees would be willing to reject a paper by an editor.
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Another exception is a founding editor of a journal, who may also be a leading figure in the field the journal was founded to spread ideas about. Think Gordon Tullock at Public Choice, Richard Day at JEBO, or Paul Davidson at JPKE. Usually these people do have somebody on their board look at it, but they are also strong editors setting an agenda, and in several of these cases some of their most cited papers were ones they pubbed in their own journal, showing that their judgment was good.
Of course, this definitely can get abused, and badly. The most notorious case was Mohammed el-Naschie of Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, who pubbed over 200 of his own papers in his own paper, citing more and more of his own papers in the journal to seriously goose the journal's impact factor. Elsevier thought this was great until the physics profession, led by John Baez, objected in places like Nature and Science, and Elsevier had to get rid of him, although he fought hard against it, threatening lawsuits and using his wealthy family to spread self-serving publicity to the point that even now taxi drivers in Egypt will tell you that he has not received the Nobel Prize in physics due to discrimination against Arabs.
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There is of course als the other side, where editors publish their paper in their own journal too boost the journals quality (usually in the beginning), even though the paper could have been published at a better journal.
That's possible, but someone may think the opposite- the paper had no chance in better journals and that's why it was published in the editor's journal.
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Let us be clear: In general editors should avoid pubbing in their own journals, although one regularly sees coeditors and especially associate ones doing so all the time (check out the correlation for the AER in particular). It is almost a perk of being on the board.
Nevertheless, there are exceptions that have been noted above, and they are real, and the test is indeed does the paper being pubbed get lots of citations, and is it the case that it might not have gotten pubbed in a "better" journal because it is in a field not currently accepted at the top journals, but which the journal being founded by the editor is intended to bring more attention and favor to? Without doubt, editors can and do abuse this, however, and extreme examples have been mentioned.