Editorial boards in accounting: The power and the glory

Abstract

This paper examines the perceptions of editorial board members about the composition, role and purpose of editorial review boards and issues relating to the ethical behaviour of reviewers and authors. It reports the views of 159 academics from a range of countries who are members of the editorial boards of English language accounting journals. There is little variation in the views of board members irrespective of professional background, age and success in publishing. However, some differences do exist based on the journal perspective which our reviewers adopted. In particular, reviewers of top 20 journals allowed reviewers and editors more discretion. Overall, the respondents believed that board appointments should be made on the basis of publication record and research reputation. Board members favour merit-based appointments and disapprove of institutional or group dominance of journals. There are, however, mixed views on attempts to engineer the composition of journal boards to include women or racial minorities. The journal editor is expected to respect the reviewing process and not accept manuscripts outside it. Wide latitude for editors to reject articles is accepted. Once the review process is initiated editors are expected not to attempt to interfere with, guide or override it. Reviewers are expected to be unbiased and professional, but it is acceptable for them to know the identity of a manuscript's author. There is also overwhelming support for the current system of sequential submission of manuscripts to journals. Overall, the results provide an insight into the standards of behaviour expected from all the major parties to the publication process. The unstated rules with which each of the parties is expected to comply are made explicit. The results have general relevance as they reflect the views of a broad constituency of experienced respondents.

Keywords:

• Author practices
• Editorial boards
• Editorial practices
• Reviewer practices
• Review process

Acknowledgements

We are very appreciative of Mark Clatworthy's help with the data analysis. We thank Neil Marriott for his comments on this paper. We would like also to thank Paul Williams and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on the paper.

Notes

1 In practice, given the extensive pre-submission writing and rewriting of prior drafts and the reviewers’ knowledge of the subject area, some reviewers will readily deduce the authors. Ceci and Peters (1984), however, for psychology suggest that although 72% of reviewers estimated they could identify authors’ identities the actual figure was only 36%. Whether the authors will be able to deduce the reviewers is still more problematic.

2 At the time we prepared our questionnaire we were unaware of the paper by Borkowski and Welsh (1998) in accounting.

3 Late responders were more in favour of boards being designed to include junior staff, women and racial minorities. They also were more supportive of including as an author someone who has contributed only in data collection. Finally, they found it less acceptable for editors to publish in the journal, even when reviewed normally.

4 We also investigated differences using the following background characteristics: post held; primary departmental allegiance; MBA; gender of respondent; and length of service in an academic post. These background characteristics are not included in the tables as we found very few significant differences. We also did not include professional qualifications (15 differences), Ph.D. (11 differences) and age (14 differences) as they might be due to change or be confounded by other characteristics. Generally, doctoral staff, younger staff and those with a high self-rank as publisher were more merit-based than the norm. In addition, we looked at whether the quality of the journal and the journal perspective used affected the responses. Journal quality was measured using the journals listed in Brinn, Jones, and Pendelbury (1996). We also tested UK against US journals and there were 21 differences. However, almost universally these were the same as for the broader category US versus non-US journals. We, therefore, just use this category as nationality of journal used (JPU). Finally, we do not report the individual results for SSR (self-rank as a researcher) or SAP (success as a publisher) here. There were 11 differences for SSR and 12 differences for SAP. In general, they had broadly similar views. These groups were also less accepting of board members and editors publishing in the journal. This may well reflect a feeling that successful researchers do not need any such privileges and object to the perception that these practices may cause. For similar reasons, successful publishers might also be more hostile to different manuscripts based on the same data being submitted to multiple refereed journals.

5 A principal components analysis was also carried out. The results do not suggest any strong or coherent components emerging. We do not, therefore, report the results here.

6 This finding of few differences in background characteristics is consistent with Gilliland and Cortina (1997) in psychology. They found few differences in beta weights of editorial board members when they analysed author and paper characteristics, reviewer evaluations and editor decisions for 823 original submissions to the Journal of Applied Psychology.

7 We ran statistical analyses to test an analysis of US versus non-US journals and top 5 against non-top 5 journals. We ran a series of two-sample Mann–Whitney tests. We found 3 significant differences when partitioning top 5 journals by US and non-US; 26 significant differences when partitioning non-top 5 journals by US and non-US (non-top 5); 15 significant differences when partitioning non-US reviewers by top 5 and non-top 5 journals; and 11 significant differences when partitioning US reviewers by top 5 and non-top 5 journals. We therefore, focus on analysis in the paper on non-top 5 journals.

8 We are grateful to Paul Williams for this point.

9 We are grateful to an unknown reviewer for this point.

10 Even in the selection of reviewers Borkowski and Welsh (1998) find respondents against editors “steering” papers to sympathetic or unsympathetic reviewers.