Abstract
Outliers, Consistency, and Context: The Importance of Reporting Variability in Editorial Office Performance Data
Highlights
Is the problem: many journal offices report key indicators as single values, such as total submission volume, number of reject decisions, total accepted manuscripts, number of accepted review invitations
Are you reporting what you think is a key value in your performance reports? Does that statistic tell the whole story? Does your audience take away a full, data-derived understanding of your journal stakeholder behaviors? Are you basing processing protocols off data points without full context?
What is a measure of variance and why is it useful to provide such a measure? A measure of variance is a summary statistic that represents the amount of spread or scattering in a data set, most commonly given as either a Standard Deviation or Interquartile Range
Summary
What is a measure of variance and why is it useful to provide such a measure? A measure of variance is a summary statistic that represents the amount of spread or scattering in a data set, most commonly given as either a Standard Deviation or Interquartile Range. Both journals presented in these visual examples have a mean turnaround time to post an initial decision of 30 days. If you employed this table, you would be reporting that on average it takes a manuscript 41 days to receive an initial decision, but it could happen in as few as 7 days or as much as 130 days, as was the case in the most extreme examples over the time period measured. Due to the potential presence of outliers, the range is not a good statistic to report (at least in isolation, without further statistics) because it can give a false impression of what is happening routinely
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
