Final Control Volume Analysis

The tenure of an editor is, from a variety of viewpoints, mercifully limited. With high hopes and prodigious plans begun, the editorship soon becomes immersed in a rising tide of submissions requiring reviews and decisions in a timely manner. Toward the end of the tenure, a clearer, more balanced view emerges, motivating this stocktaking or control volume analysis, as it were, on the flow of manuscripts.

The transition to an Internet-based system of submission/review/publication was undoubtedly the major milestone defining the last four years. As the first large monthly ASCE journal to dip our toes in digital waters, we contributed our share to working out the bugs of the system. Improvements can still be made, and innovations will be added, but very few, if any, in the hydraulic research community are nostalgic for paper-based submissions. The greater degree of security, transparency, accountability, even convenience, is welcome; but the problem of overly long reviews remains resistant. In an increasingly fragmented and competitive research publishing environment emphasizing citation metrics with real consequences for research careers, the appropriate balance between review time and review quality needs to be struck. While review time can be readily quantified, a corresponding metric of review quality is not available. Even so, a positive correlation between review time and review quality may be as weak (or nonexistent?), particularly beyond a certain time, as any found in sediment transport or hydrology.

Some relevant data and statistics for the 40-month period (1 May 2006 to 28 Aug. 2009, covering the period of operation of the Internet system, which allows convenient compilation of such data) are given in Table 1. As is often the case with flow problems, data are limited, and a stationary state may not have been established, but the analysis may still be of interest. Over 1,200 manuscripts were handled, corresponding to an inflow manuscript velocity of ≈1 ms/day with final decisions (accept or reject, or withdrawn) rendered on 74%, the remainder being at various stages of the review process. The globalization of the authorship is seen in that only ≈ 25% of the submissions originate in North America, and only about a third from English-speaking countries. The latter has particular repercussions because poor English usage or, more broadly speaking, poor presentation, can adversely affect the evaluation of a manuscript, or unduly prolong the review process.

Almost 4,400 reviews were solicited, but only ≈3,000 reviews were submitted by over 1,000 different reviewers. Finding good reviewers and maintaining uniformly high standards continue to present challenges to the editorial board. Interestingly, once a reviewer has agreed to perform a review, the average time taken for the review is only ≈50 days. The contributions of all reviewers should be acknowledged, but those of Giuseppe Oliveto, Nian-Sheng Cheng, Brett Sanders, and Jochen Aberle, who each performed 12 or more reviews (including rereviews) during the 40-month period, merit special mention.

A large fraction (>85%) of those accepted have already appeared in print. What may be surprising is the rather low ratio of accepted submissions relative to the number of final decisions (ratio of 0.38) or to the number of submissions (a ratio of 0.28). The low values might be interpreted as reflecting journal selectivity, but are also skewed by the sizeable fraction (0.25) of submissions still to be decided, the majority of which is likely to be eventually accepted. The average number of revisions is ≈3, suggesting that reviewers are not as clear as might be desired, or that authors are not as careful in responding to the concerns of reviewers and the editorial board (or of course a possibly particularly picayune editor). Not a few manuscripts began the process as a technical paper, but ultimately were converted into technical notes, which may explain the higher percentage of technical notes accepted, and also the higher average number of revisions for technical notes. The large bulk of negative decisions were rendered on the original manuscript, with a significant portion of these being rendered without external review, based on whether the topic was of sufficient interest to the readership. Nevertheless, ≈15% of manuscripts surviving the initial round of reviews was eventually rejected.

Besides the acceptance ratio, the time for review completion (or to final decision) and the time to publication are of greatest interest to authors. The time from submission to publication in print, generally about 20 months, is on first appearance certainly nothing to trumpet. Closer examination reveals a fuzzier picture. About a third of this period is accounted for by the publication rather than by the review process. The unusually long publication time for discussions/closures arises because discussions must typically wait for authors’ closures before being published. The frustration with a tardy publication process will be alleviated or eliminated by the technological fix of the “post ahead of print” option, recently introduced for ASCE journals. Thus, manuscripts that have been finally accepted by the ASCE office are, with the authors’ consent, posted online in preview (before copyediting) citable form. Taking into account this publication period still leaves an average time from submission to final acceptance of ≈13 months. This however includes the time periods during which the author(s) are revising the manuscript, which on average is ≈4 months, such that the average total time for a review is ≈9 months. With an average of ≈3 revisions, the total of ≈9 months no longer seems as reprehensible as it might otherwise seem. An average time from submission to first decision of ≈5 months nonetheless leaves ample scope for improvement, and there are unfortunately still too many manuscripts on the positive tail of the distribution.

Much electronic ink or toner has been expended on the ISI impact factor (IF). Suffice it to note that the 2008 value (1.27) is a high for the journal, but it comes after a local minimum of 0.88 in 2007. As such, one should not be overly self-congratulatory, but rather regard the IF signal as analogous to a possibly unsteady turbulent signal. An attraction of the IF, contributing to its broad use, is its relative simplicity; an alternative and, according to some, more robust but much more complicated (and therefore perhaps doomed to obscurity) metric is the article influence (AI) score published by Eigenfactor.org. A cursory examination indicates that within the same field such as water resources, the IF and the AI lead to comparable if not identical relative assessments of journal impact (our journal is ranked 12th among Water Resources journals according to the AI 2007 index, but is ranked 20th according to the 2008 IF). Such citation metrics should of course be considered in the context of the broader mission of the journal, particularly service to the entire hydraulic engineering community—a sizeable fraction of which may be engineering rather than citing. Alternative metrics based on download statistics might also be considered—the most downloaded papers often include some surprises including some not particularly highly cited contributions—but also need careful interpretation.

During the past four years, there have also been notable changes in personnel, both on the editorial board as well as in the ASCE journals office. More than a third of the associate editors who served at the beginning of my tenure—Philippe Coussot, Junke Guo, Willi Hager, Ben Hodges, Rollin Hotchkiss, Peter Stansby, Peter Steffler, Richard Stocksill, Steve Wright, and Poojitha Yapa—have since stepped down. Fortunately, the journal found able successors in Terry Sturm, Greg Lawrence, Vlad Nikora, Alex McCorquodale, Subhasish Dey, David Zhu, Andrea Marion, and Herve Capart. The original ASCE support team of Johanna Reinhart, Jackie Perry, Holly Koppel, and Jane Perry has also made way, in a smooth fashion, for the new team of Melissa Junior, Kelly Anderson, Liz Guertin, Holly (still there), and Leslie Taege. All of those past and present editorial board members and ASCE staff have contributed substantially to the successes of the journal during my tenure, and thanks are due to them for making the work of the editor much less onerous than it otherwise could have been. My assistant, Dinah Hackerd, and my home institution, Purdue University’s School of Civil Engineering, also deserve thanks for their support.

Daily wrestling with issues such as the relevance to practice, the appropriate range of topics, uniformity and consistency in standards of acceptance and rejection, the journal editor (and by extension the entire editorial board) plays the privileged role of the keeper of a complicated, manually operated hydraulic control structure: part gate, part diversion structure, part settling basin or clarifier, largely based on established technical principles, but still involving some human judgment. Some errors may have been made in its effective operation—meritorious contributions rejected and mediocre contributions accepted—but hopefully none so egregious as to be catastrophic. It has been said of journal editors (though not necessarily originally so) that the best measure of a scientist’s influence is how long he can hold back the progress in his field. I hope that, by this measure, my influence during my tenure has been slight, and whatever influence exerted has been benign.

Terry Sturm of Georgia Tech has agreed to serve as the new journal editor, bringing to the post not only experience as an associate editor, but also as author of well-known textbook and with a broad range of expertise in open channel flows and sediment transport. In parting, I wish the new editor an equally rewarding tenure, and express the hope that the essential endeavor that is the Journal will continue the tradition of providing a familiar intellectual meeting place for our community.