How to Be a Good Editor

Skills, Strategies, and Scenarios for Ecological Journals

John M. Drake

Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia

Ecological Society of America 2026

Salt Lake City, Utah

July 3, 2026

The panel

John Drake Ecology Letters

Volker Rudolf The American Naturalist

Kathy Cottingham Ecology

~1 min. Welcome people and introduce the three of us by name and journal. Note that between us we handle manuscripts for three of the field’s flagship journals, with three somewhat different house styles — and that the differences are part of today’s lesson. Hand to the mood-setter.

“Most of the manuscripts we send out for review, we end up rejecting — and that is the job working, not failing.”

~1 min. This is the mood-setter and the first real idea. Said aloud it gets a rueful laugh, because every editor in the room has felt the guilt of the decline. Reframe it: a good decline, written well, is a service to the author and to the reviewer pool. Rudolf says exactly this in his letter — authors thank him for rejections. Land the line, then move on. (Optional: swap this quotation slide for a peer-review cartoon if licensed art is supplied.)

Associate editors do the most consequential invisible work in science

Authors and reviewers get the public credit. The associate editor reads the manuscript, chooses the reviewers, weighs what comes back, and writes the decision that shapes what enters the literature — almost always without a byline.

~1.5 min. Open from the first paragraph of “The Virtuous Editor.” The point to make: this is high-leverage work done in the dark. Most of us learned it by imitation, with no formal training — which is exactly why this workshop exists. Resist listing everything an AE does; the next slides do that.

Yet almost no one is ever taught how to do it

Most editors learn the craft by accident — a first assignment lands in the inbox, and the norms are absorbed by imitation, one decision letter at a time.

Today we try to make some of that tacit knowledge explicit.

~1 min. This is the workshop’s reason for being. Keep it short. The “tacit knowledge made explicit” line sets up the objectives slide that follows.

What you will leave with

By the end of the session you will be able to:

• Exercise independent editorial judgment instead of counting reviewer votes
• Manage workload, reviewers, and turnaround without losing your evenings
• Write decisions that are clear, fair, and genuinely useful to authors
• Handle the hard cases — split reviews, hostile reviews, conflicts, and bias

~1.5 min. These are the six README objectives compressed to four spoken ones. Don’t read them verbatim; point at each and give a one-line gloss. Tell people the back half of the session — the scenarios — is where they will practice the hard cases listed in the last bullet.

How the next ninety minutes run

0:00	Introduction and objectives	now
0:10	Three editors, three journals	8 min each
0:40	Scenario exercises	small groups
1:00	Debrief — how editors actually decided	all of us
1:15	Open discussion and the future of the journals	everyone

~1.5 min. Walk the arc once so people know when the interactive part comes. Emphasize that the middle of the session is short remarks, not full talks, and the back half belongs to them. Then hand to the first panelist.

Journal placement is sorting, not ranking

The journals in this room differ in who reads them and what they are for. A manuscript that is wrong for Ecology Letters can be exactly right for Ecology or The American Naturalist — same quality, different home.

A decline is often a routing decision, not a verdict on the work.

~1.5 min. This reframes what the next three panelists are doing. We are not three points on one scale from lenient to harsh; we serve three different readerships with three different missions, so “fit” means something specific at each journal. Make the point that treating placement as a single quality ranking is the mistake behind a lot of author frustration and a lot of lazy editing — the good editor asks “is this the right venue for this contribution,” not “is this a 7 or an 8.” Sets up the three mini-talks that follow.

John Drake

Ecology Letters — the distributed editorial board

PANEL SLOT 1 of 3 · 8 minutes. This transition slide is the hand-off; John’s own mini-deck loads from here. Facilitator keeps time and gives a one-minute warning. If the personal deck is unavailable, this slide is a safe fallback to speak from.

Volker Rudolf

The American Naturalist — the society journal’s mission

PANEL SLOT 2 of 3 · 8 minutes. Hand to Volker; his mini-deck loads from here. Keep time; one-minute warning. His “Dear Associate Editors” letter is in the repo handouts if he wants to point to it.

Kathy Cottingham

Ecology — consistency at scale

PANEL SLOT 3 of 3 · 8 minutes. Hand to Kathy; her mini-deck loads from here. Keep time; one-minute warning. Close the panel by previewing the exercises.

The exercises

Four real situations, lightly disguised

~30 sec. Transition into the active part. Tell people these scenarios are drawn from real (anonymized) editorial situations and the source documents we just heard about. Move quickly to the instructions.

How the exercises work

• Groups of four to five. Each table takes the scenario on its card.
• Twelve minutes. Read it, then work toward a recommendation and a one-line rationale.
• Pick a reporter. One person will give your table’s call in the debrief.

There is no answer key. Experienced editors disagree on every one of these.

~2 min, then the room works for ~12 min. Set the task clearly: not “what is the right answer” but “what would you do, and why, in one sentence.” Hand out the scenario cards (or point to the on-screen scenario if running a single shared case). Circulate while they work. Give a two-minute warning. The four scenario slides that follow are for display if you are running them one at a time rather than from printed cards.

Scenario 1 — The two-to-one vote

Two reviewers are enthusiastic and recommend acceptance. The third is scathing. Reading the paper yourself, you think the lone critic has found a flaw that sinks the central claim — and the two positive reviews never engage with it.

What do you recommend, and how do you write the letter?

The vote-counting trap. The teaching point in debrief: an AE is not a vote-tallier. Drake’s editorial and Rudolf §4 both insist the decision rests on the editor’s own reading. The hard part is writing a decline that overrides a 2–1 “majority” respectfully.

Scenario 2 — The diamond in the rough

A manuscript has a genuinely original idea and a one-of-a-kind dataset, buried under poor writing and a shaky analysis. The reviews are harsh and lean toward rejection. A clean decline would be the easy call.

Decline, decline-with-resubmission, or major revision? On what grounds?

Rudolf §3 and §5 — the Meg Duffy / Mercer Award case, where a paper rejected elsewhere became a prize-winner under a patient editor. Tension to surface: the value of rescuing a strong idea against the cost of endless revision cycles (Rudolf §6). When is it worth it?

Scenario 3 — The useful, brutal review

One review is substantively excellent and also contemptuous — mocking the authors’ competence by name. The science in it is too good to discard.

How do you use the content without passing on the cruelty?

Reviewer management and the AE as buffer (Drake; Rudolf §4). Debrief points: edit/quote selectively, summarize the substance in your own voice, and decide whether to counsel the reviewer privately. Connect to the rule that you should not invite a reviewer you would be afraid to overrule.

Scenario 4 — The borderline desk reject

A paper from an under-resourced lab arrives in imperfect English on a regional question. Your instinct is a quick desk reject. The reviewers who come to mind are the same handful you always use.

What checks do you run on that instinct before you act?

Implicit bias (Rudolf §8; Drake on diverse reviewers). Debrief points: separate language and framing from scientific merit; the cost of widening the reviewer pool versus the cost of a biased miss; that the AE sees author identity while reviewers (double-blind) do not. This is the scenario most likely to divide the room — let it.

Debrief

What did you decide — and what did the editors do?

~15 min total. For each scenario: take a call from one or two tables, then have the relevant panelist give the editor’s-eye view. Keep it conversational. The four debrief beats below are prompts, not slides to read.

The throughline across all four

An associate editor’s job is to exercise judgment, not to count votes.

• Decline well, and the rejection becomes a gift to the author
• The decision is yours to defend in your own voice, reviewers advise
• Watch the cases where bias hides — language, geography, reputation
• Move quickly; a slow fair decision still costs the author

~2 min. This is the synthesis. Whatever the tables decided, these four threads run through all three journals’ practice — they are the common DNA between Rudolf’s letter and Drake’s editorial. Say plainly that the journals differ in their mechanics but agree on this core.

If you want to be the one handling the papers

Not an editor yet? The path is less mysterious than it looks:

• Tell a senior editor. Make your interest known and be specific about your expertise — that is what they reach for when a matching paper lands.
• Review, and review well. A sharp, on-time review is the audition. Editors remember who writes them, and boards are built from that pool.
• Know the local custom. Some boards welcome a direct self-nomination; others prefer to extend the invitation themselves. When in doubt, ask — or let good reviewing do the asking for you.

~1.5 min. Speak to the early-career people in the room. The single most reliable route onto a board is a track record of excellent, prompt reviews; the second is simply being known to want it. Be candid that norms differ — at some journals a self-nomination email is welcome, at others it can land badly, so the safe move is to express interest and offer to review rather than to ask outright for a seat.

Questions & discussion

Open the floor. Field questions for any of the three panelists, and use them to surface the themes people most want to dig into before the closing. Keep it conversational; hand across the panel rather than answering everything yourself.

Where the journals go next

Thank you — now go write a decision letter you would be glad to receive.

~remaining time, open discussion. Seed it from the abstract’s closing: transparency, equity, efficiency, and the experience for authors, reviewers, and editors. Invite the room and the panel to push on what should change. This is a conversation, not a slide to lecture from. End on the closing line; let it land rather than summarizing. Take any final questions.