Editorial Board Membership, Time to Accept, and the Effect on the Citation Counts of Journal Articles

Abstract

In this paper we report on a study of 1541 articles from three different journals (Journal of Informetrics, Information Processing and Management, and Computers and Electrical Engineering) from the period 2007–2014. We analyzed their dates of submission and of final decision to accept and investigated whether the difference between these two dates (the so-called “time to accept”) is smaller for the articles authored by the corresponding journal’s editorial board members and whether longer times to accept yield higher citation counts. The main results are that we found significantly shorter times to accept editorial board member’s articles only in Journal of Informetrics and not in the other two journals, and that articles in any of these journals that took longer to be accepted did not receive markedly more citations.

Keywords

• journals
• editorial boards
• editorial delay
• citedness
• correlation