Editorial

In writing this brief editorial, I introduce the reconfigured Advisory Board. It was three years ago in 2022 when I had last updated the Board. Since then, sadly, a few colleagues have passed away, namely, Bohumil Palek, Jacob L. Mey and Aaron V. Cicourel. A few have retired from active scholarship and yet others who find that their professional commitments prevent them from undertaking peer review activities on a regular basis. In expressing my heartfelt gratitude for their unwavering support in the past years, I bid farewell to the following colleagues who will no longer serve on the Advisory Board: Johannes Angermuller, Peter R. R. White, Stuart Allan, François Cooren, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Juliane House, Elizabeth Keating, Sirpa Leppänen, Paul Luff, Paul Prior, Jan Svennevig, Caroline Tagg and Joanna Thornborrow. I wish them well and remain hopeful that I can call upon them from time to time with a request for taking on the peer reviewer role.

Simultaneously, I take this opportunity to heartily welcome the following colleagues who have enthusiastically accepted my invite to join the Advisory Board: Elisabetta Adami, Marta Dynel, Susan Ehrlich, Stefan Th. Gries, Bethany Gray, Helmut Gruber, Pentti Haddington, Guangwei Hu, Sylvia Jaworska, Daniel Kadar, Michelle M. Lazar, David Machin, Paul Kei Matsuda, Gerard O’Grady, Anne O’Keeffe, Xiaoting Li, Cornelia Müller, Louise Ravelli, Martin Reisigl, John E. Richardson, Betty Samraj, Philip Seargeant, Melisa Stevanovic, Hongyin Tao and Ann Weatherall. In welcoming them aboard, I very much look forward to working with them to sustain TEXT & TALK’s unique status in the interdisciplinary field, while strategizing changes in directions as required.

In its current form the Advisory Board is much expanded and diversified to accommodate the increasing volume of submissions from a range of sub-disciplines. It is not straightforward to anticipate future trends in submission that would align with the international and interdisciplinary representation in the Advisory Board. The trends in submission keep shifting – conceptually, methodologically and analytically – and some strands of inquiry seem to attract more scholars than others. The decision is mainly motivated by the current trend in manuscript submissions and the expanded Board reflects this. The overall goal is unchanged in that TEXT & TALK remains open to different strands of scholarship.

Peer review remains the benchmark for quality journals, yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit an adequate number of quality peer reviewers to manage the workflow in a timely fashion. It has been particularly challenging in the post-COVID era, which corresponds to an increased volume of submissions.

A further point relates to the exponential increase in desk rejections, partly to protect reviewers’ time commitments. I have been struck by this rise in desk rejections in recent years. In the early days of my editorship of TEXT (as it was then known) in late 1990s, the desk rejection was less than 5 % and it stayed that way for nearly two decades. One explanation for the lower desk rejections at the time could be that authors knew the remit and requirements of TEXT & TALK. So, they used a self-filtering process and only submitted their work which had the promise of being peer reviewed. Also, these authors were not under the spell of ‘publish or perish’, which meant they produced a small number of publishable mss that would be deemed suitable for submission to TEXT & TALK. It undoubtedly took authors relatively long periods of time to design their studies and to collect and manually analyze relevant data, which slowed down the submission rate. This latter point can be contrasted with the speed at which authors at the present time mine data from social media platforms, use various software to analyze their data, leading to the increase in the rate of submissions as well as desk rejections, individually and collectively.

Receiving a desk rejection is not that dissimilar to being rejected after peer review, where all three reviewers variously tick the ‘reject’ or the ‘resubmission’ box. The underlying reason is that although the ms is structured and written well, it uses standard methodological tools and analytical frameworks to engage with the data, thus falling short of originality. This might be called an ‘assignment syndrome’ – when journal articles resemble course work at graduate and postgraduate levels. Analytically systematic accounts of one’s data, however robust, do not approximate scholarship as conceptualized within the realm of high ranking journals. Against this backdrop, I would urge future authors to reflect critically about their study designs while explicating the original contribution their study wishes to underline. I very much hope that in the coming years the desk rejection rates will reverse to what they were three decades ago and that submitting authors will benefit unequivocally from the peer review process.