SYSTEM DYNAMICS REVIEW

REPORT OF EXECUTIVE EDITOR TO POLICY COUNCIL
(FEBRUARY 2002)

1. Change of Executive Editor

The handover of the executive editorship has gone smoothly. Graham Winch and myself met with the relevant members of Wiley's staff at their offices in Chichester in November 2001 and this meeting proved extremely useful in facilitating the changeover. Communications between myself, the Managing Editors and the Production Editor at Wiley are now live and working well.

2. Volume 18

18:1 is at press. This consists of 3 main articles and 1 Notes and Insights. The main articles include the J W Forrester Prize Winner's paper, held over from 17:4 as the recipient had to take on extra duties at his university and could not produce his manuscript in time for 17:4.

18:2 Special tribute issue to Dana Meadows being coordinated by John Sterman. On-track.

18:3 Special on SD in SME's and other Smaller Organizations. Carmine Bianchi is editing and again no problems reported.

18:4 Normal issue. This should contain the Forrester Prize Winner's paper and 2-3 other articles. These should be forthcoming from the current backlog.

3. Article Backlog

There are certainly in excess of ten full articles in various stages of review, but how many of these will come to fruition as a finally-accepted paper is debatable. There are a number of papers which have been in the system for 2-3 years and are unlikely ever to reach this final acceptance stage. The need to increase the inflow of papers has not gone away and hopefully initiatives mentioned below will help.

4. Rejection Rate

It is difficult to estimate this precisely because one needs to look over a number of years and I have not yet fully synchronized my central database with those of the Managing Editors. However, it appears that around 40% of articles are rejected either after one or two reviews.

5. Associate Editors

I am in the process of freshening up the team of Associate Editors, by retiring a few who have been listed for a long time and who may not be as active as they once were and by recruiting others willing to either submit one paper per annum themselves or at least solicit one. Associate editors who are retained will be reminded of their obligations.

6. Policy on Special (Themed) Issues

A document is being drafted based on the sentiments expressed on this matter at the Atlanta meeting of editors. It will be circulated to relevant parties in the near future.

7. Proposal to link conference papers to papers for the Journal

After the Bergen conference David Andersen and Jim Hines put a lot of work in on linking reviewing of conference papers to reviewing for the journal. A 3-page document was produced including a time plan.

To my knowledge this was never implemented for Atlanta. It may be appropriate to revive this idea for Palermo and subsequent conferences. At a simplistic level, reviewers of conference papers could (optionally) include in their report an encouragement to also prepare a version for SDR - but only if the submission showed enough promise. For what it is worth, our paper on AIDS in 17:2 was an extended version of the one submitted for Atlanta and included in the Proceedings.

Brian Dangerfield
January 2002

Last modified: January 30, 2002