Publishing while editor: Transparency and behaviour in public administration journals

Abstract

Journal editors serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, a role critical to preserving the quality and standards of good research. Some scholars have questioned whether editors have taken advantage of their position to publish their own work. To understand the extent to which editors of public administration journals self-publish, we examined publishing patterns over a 20-year period. We collected the names of editors from the mastheads of 13 generalist public administration journals from 1997 to 2016 and used data indexed from Web of Science to look at articles published in those journals during the same time. We found that while self-publishing behaviour is not common across the entire field, it is a trend for certain journals and individuals. We also found the practice of self-publishing is influenced by whether an individual served in a primary editorial role (e.g., editor-in-chief), length of editorial service, and overall scholarly productivity. We discuss appropriateness and ethical implications of the practice.

Temporal search persistence, certainty, and source preference in dentistry: Results from the National Dental PBRN

“…Additionally, these data suggest a gender effect with respect to search persistence where women in the sample were more likely than men to continue searching after a first source did not provide an answer -though these results beg the question of whether certain professionals are better at searching, better trained at searching, or just more confident with the information they find. Certainly, the differences found regarding gender identity merit further investigation, and have corollaries in other professional domains [ 41 , 42 ].…”

Editors publishing in their own journals: A systematic review of prevalence and a discussion of normative aspects

“…• It would risk deterring potential editors if they would not be able to publish in the journal for which they became editors, which threatens to lead to less competent persons taking on the job (Hamilton et al, 2020;Rosenblum et al, 2020).…”

Editors publishing in their own journals – a systematic review of prevalence and a discussion of normative aspects

“…[editors] will have undue influence over the process and possibly be able to get inferior work published" (Smith 2002). Rosenblum (2020) takes the reasoning further by arguing that "knowingly […] bypassing the peer-review process to self-publish constitutes editorial misconduct". Even if editors do not pressure journal colleagues to accept their work, or decide on their own about their own manuscript, favoritism may still lead to easier acceptance of submitted papers (Luty et al 2009).…”

“… it would risk deterring potential editors if they would not be able to publish in the journal for which they became editor, which threatens to lead to less competent persons taking on the job (Rosenblum, 2020;Hamilton, 2020).…”

“… such restrictions would also have negative, and unfair, effects on collaborators of researching editors, since their options are also affected for their joint papers (Hoey, 1999;Hamilton, 2020). Some arguments particularly concern specialized journals or small research fields, such as:  It would be bad for the readers and the field if they missed specialized content suitable mainly for a specialized journal, if editors in the field were not allowed to publish in their journal (Rosenblum 2020). It has been suggested that some original research may be of main interest to the reader of that specific journalarguably one should try to publish where the material is most relevant (Hoey 1999;Smith 2002;Youk & Park 2019, Zdenek & Losova 2018.…”