EDITORIAL The telephone connection It has often been suggested to me and to members of the Editorial Advisory Board that telephoning prospective reviewers of research manuscripts prior to mailing them material would expedite the review process. Advocates of this procedure, which is followed by Science, believe that time will be saved by permitting reviewers who do not feel qualified to criticize a particular manuscript, or whose time schedules are presently filled, to decline this service directly and save unnecessary mailing time. At its last meeting, therefore, the Editorial Advisory Board decided to initiate an experimental program for evaluating this procedure. T h e experiment was conducted by Rosalind Bish in Katherine Biggs’ office on all manuscripts processed through their office from March through June 1979. A sufficient number of phone calls were made for each manuscript until two rcvieuers had agreed to handle it. This required 671 telephone calls for the 82 manuscripts processed in this period; an average of approximately eight calls per manuscript (range 1-26). The average time per phone call was 23 minutes (range 2-75). In order to determine the utility of this procedure, the data were compared to two control samples. The first sample consisted of 80 manuscripts submitted to the Joirrrial of Agricultural arid Food Cheniistry that u c r e sent out for review without prior calling during the same time period in which reviewers were called for the ES&T manuscripts. T h e second sample consisted of 80 manuscripts that were submitted to ES& T bctwcen July 1978 and February 1979. These manuscripts were handled in the usual fashion and no telephone calls were made. The comparative data is shown below: J Ag ES&T Food ES&T (no calls) (no calls) (with calls)
Sample size Time from receipt to review (working days) Mean Median Mode Range
80
80
82
10.6 8.5 8 2-27
10.7 11 12 3-18
12.9 12 9 5-30
Review time (days) Mean M ed i a n Mode 22 Range Late reviews ?G late % ’ over one week late
25.9 22 and 29 5-90
21.4 20 14 7-54
23.5 22 22 7-69
47.9 27.5
36.2 17.7
45.3 25.8
The data do not reveal any significant improvement i n processing time as a result of the telephone call efI‘ort. T h e net investment in work time placing the phone calls amounted to an average of 1.3 work days per month exclusive of time lost for other office duties while waiting for return calls and exclusive of the cost of the 6 17 long distance telephone calls. Other data gathered during this experiment (not reported here) suggest that the telephone procedure m a y significantly decrease the percentage of manuscripts requiring additional opinions after the receipt of the initial two reviews. Other potential advantages noted by Ms. Bish and Ms. Biggs include updating of rcviewcr files with regard to address and title changes :IS well a s shifts in fields of interest among previously used reviewers. On the whole the data does not support any change i n our reviewer selection or manuscript transmission po I i c i es ,
Volume 13, Number 10, October 1979
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