But I have done my bit now, and then some. From a reciprocity perspective I continue to believe that being an editor at some point was appropriate given all the editorial work that I have created and will create for others through my own submissions. Nonetheless, I have no intention to agree to be a journal editor again. I would make the same decision to become an APSR editor again, knowing what I know now.Second, if you stop carefully thinking through why you are making the decisions you are making, it is very likely that you will let your potential biases go unreflected upon. First, it makes writing the decision letters more difficult. Is this an APSR paper or not? At a certain point, like a machine learning classifier, you start to lose the ability to articulate how it is that you know the answer to this question. Unfortunately, given the submission rate, actually spending that much time thinking about each manuscript would require spending far too much time overall, so there is a strong incentive to be the most efficient classifier that you can be. The hope is that you will get to read and think about lots of the latest and best research in the field. Editorial work did not remain intellectually engaging for the entire term that I was editor.Optimising for less time but more money with which to do research has contributed to shifting my research in new directions that I am pleased with. Most of my compensation from APSA went into supporting my research, primarily running survey experiments.I have had less time to do research for the last four years, but have also become far more efficient. I learned things about the field and about the peer review process.
The experience of being an editor has been useful for improving how I present my own research.I had a few difficult exchanges with authors and reviewers about close calls, but remarkably few. Some of these become apparent, some do not. Even beyond the judgment calls by reviewers and editors that might have come out another way, there are decisions which are simply mistakes, one way or the other, because the reviewers and editors err. Unfortunately, if you are handling the volume of manuscripts that the APSR handles, with the very low acceptance rate that the journal maintains, the only thing one can be very confident of is that some of the decisions would not have come out the same way if we re-ran the review process.I am grateful for all the reviews that I received, many of them from political scientists I have never met. I had remarkably few cases of intemperate or inappropriate reviews, although of course review quality does vary! The best reviews are remarkably detailed and thoughtful, but more importantly, most reviews were good enough to make me comfortable about the vast majority of the decisions. While many journals struggle to get reviewers, the rate at which reviewers accepted our invitations was consistently high. The ability of editors to make sound decisions is fundamentally dependent on reviewers taking their task seriously, and the vast majority of reviewers do so.
When you add to that the fact that you are constantly having to make difficult decisions (on which careers may depend) it is fundamentally not a fun job. The manuscript in the queue that is currently longest in review is always one that has been under review for too long.
Even though it is always something that you could put off until tomorrow if there is something more urgent, the fact that it never done is a constant source of nagging stress. There is always a queue of editorial activity that you could be doing. Being an editor is a constant, low-level source of stress. Here are some departing thoughts on the job in no particular order and with no overarching thesis.
Over that time, as one of six associate editors, I have managed the review process for 742 manuscripts, about 200 per year. I have just completed a 3.75 year tenure as an associate editor of the American Political Science Review.
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