Being on the edi­to­r­ial board of a jour­nal is a lot of work. I’m cur­rently Editor-​​in-​​Chief of the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing and pre­vi­ously I’ve been The­ory & Meth­ods Edi­tor of the Aus­tralian & New Zealand Jour­nal of Sta­tis­tics. Although it is time-​​consuming and often goes un-​​noticed, there are some impor­tant rewards that make it worth­while in my opinion.

1. You are forced to read care­fully a lot of papers in your area of inter­est. Every­one intends read­ing the papers pub­lished in their area, but this activ­ity often gets neglected for more urgent activ­i­ties. When you are an edi­tor or asso­ciate edi­tor, you have to read the papers, and you have to read them thor­oughly. That way you are forced to keep up-​​to-​​date with new ideas.
2. You become bet­ter known in your field. This tends to lead to invi­ta­tions to speak at con­fer­ences, write invited papers, etc.
3. You get to shape the dis­ci­pline to some extent, at least once you are a man­ag­ing edi­tor. For exam­ple, you can arrange a spe­cial issue or a review paper on a topic that you think needs addressing.
4. It brings with it some prestige.
5. You get to see a lot of the lat­est research before every­one else, although these days, that is becom­ing less of an issue as most peo­ple put their papers online in repos­i­to­ries such as RePEc or arXiv.

I some­times get emails from peo­ple ask­ing to join the edi­to­r­ial board of the IJF (usu­ally accom­pa­nied by a resumé which shows the per­son has lit­tle expe­ri­ence in fore­cast­ing research). One such email prompted this post today. I will never invite some­one to join the IJF edi­to­r­ial board in this way. Please don’t ask. Instead, if you want to join an edi­to­r­ial board, there is no sub­sti­tute for the fol­low­ing approach:

• write good papers that are pub­lished in the rel­e­vant jour­nal (if you’ve never pub­lished in the IJF you are unlikely to be con­sid­ered for the edi­to­r­ial board);
• write good papers that are pub­lished in other jour­nals on the rel­e­vant topic (e.g., pub­lish good fore­cast­ing papers in JASA, JRSSB, JF, etc.);
• reg­u­larly attend any con­fer­ences asso­ci­ated with the jour­nal (that’s the ISF);
• pro­vide high qual­ity ref­eree reports for papers sub­mit­ted to the jour­nal (almost all our asso­ciate edi­tors were peo­ple who did a ster­ling job as ref­er­ees first);
• work in an area where we need addi­tional asso­ciate edi­tors (every year we con­sider what areas we need new asso­ciate edi­tors, and then we find the appro­pri­ate people).

Being on an edi­to­r­ial board gives you a posi­tion of lead­er­ship in your research com­mu­nity. But you don’t get to be a leader until you’ve proven your­self by writ­ing papers, attend­ing con­fer­ences, writ­ing ref­eree reports, etc.

Related Posts:

• Why ref­eree?
• Becom­ing a referee
• Should you make your work­ing papers public?
• Ref­er­ee­ing a jour­nal article
• Writ­ing a ref­eree report