Editors' report: Reflections for the <i>Journal of Research in Science Teaching</i> (2015–2020)

We have very recently concluded our full term of editing the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST), the official journal of NARST: A Global Organization for Improving Science Education through Research. Our editorial team managed all incoming submissions for the 5-year period from 2015 through 2019, and was responsible for publishing five JRST volumes, from 2016 through 2020 (volumes 53 through 57). We now bring you this report to describe our work, highlight the outcomes of our 5-year editorship, and situate this work, with the benefit of hindsight, from the perspective of the Journal's recent history. We are the third team to have completed our editorship since JRST's key shift in 2005 to the online submission and review of manuscripts, supported by the ScholarOne Manuscripts™ system. The shift resulted in concomitant, substantial, and continuing increases in the number of JRST manuscript submissions and those coming from non-US based authors. The shift surely brought welcome and decisive advantages to JRST, as well as the challenge of managing a substantially increased yearly volume of submissions. Here, we use ScholarOne Manuscripts™ reporting tools, metrics provided by Wiley®—the publisher of JRST, and indexing resources—especially, the Web of Science™, to shed light on some key patterns and performance metrics for JRST. We began our editorship with a firm commitment to uphold, deepen, and expand foundational dimensions of JRST. We identified a set of goals and initiatives in support of our vision and commitments. The Journal was entrusted to our care for the period of the editorship, passed to us from those who came before us, and we now have passed the care of JRST on to those who follow us in this endeavor, soon to celebrate its 60th year in 2023. As would be expected, our first and primary goal was to maintain and continue to improve JRST's position as the premier, global research journal in science education, and one of the top-ranked, cited, and impactful journals in the broader field of education. Foundational to our commitments was publishing high quality research that aims to answer significant and substantial educational questions, which are pertinent to various constituents of our global science education community. To that end, we encouraged a diversity of research methods, ranging from experimental and quasi-experimental intervention studies, to high-end statistical analyses of large primary and secondary data sets, conceptual analyses of philosophical and theoretical issues, to naturalistic studies of educational settings, all the way to auto-ethnographies. We welcomed research undertaken from various theoretical lenses, from the individual, cognitive, and psychological to the collective, social, and cultural, and every variant in between. Our guiding criteria were found not in the research traditions chosen, but in whether or not the underlying arguments made were congruent with those research traditions. We continued JRST's broad focus on all aspects of science education, including teaching science in primary school all the way to learner experiences in doctoral education in the sciences; preservice to in-service science teacher education and continuing professional development; formal and informal science teaching and learning; equity, diversity, and inclusion in science education; traditional school curricula to after-school serious gaming programs; sociocultural perspectives of science teaching and learning; and growing intersections among science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the humanities, to mention a few areas. Our unwavering commitment was to uphold standards for publication that emphasized the significance, rigor, and contribution of manuscripts published in JRST both in terms of meaningfully adding to or challenging the existing literature, and addressing important questions that are relevant to various national and international contexts, from around the globe (Abd-El-Khalick & Zeidler, 2015). Thus, with the outset of our editorship, we re-ascertained and consistently implemented a robust, double-blind, peer review process. While we were aware of ongoing discussions in scholarly fields about the merits and benefits, as well as limitations and burdens, of this review process, we did not see a robust and epistemologically viable alternative that would enable us to uphold the standards of significance, rigor, and contribution for research published in JRST. In the same spirit, we ventured to introduce, and hopefully institute, a new, inclusive, and transparent process to JRST special issues, which also employed double-blind review (see Neumann & Waight, 2019; Sadler & Brown, 2017). A second foundational dimension of our editorship was to affirm and expand JRST's function as an educative tool. We continued the crucial practice of prior JRST editors to provide high-quality, rich, and critical, but demonstratively constructive, feedback to submitting authors irrespective of the final editorial decision. This approach surely enhances the rigor and quality of published research. Equally important, providing ample feedback and guidance to authors with less-successful JRST submissions helps them further develop their work to the threshold of making contributions that are publishable in top-tier refereed journals. Finally, this practice contributes to the NARST and JRST missions in terms of developing and improving the quality and impact of science education research by nurturing early career researchers. We wanted to ensure that the very process of submitting a manuscript to JRST is an opportunity for professional growth irrespective of a submission's outcome. Additionally, to expand JRST's educative role, we launched a new initiative, the “JRST Doctoral Student Mentored Reviewer Initiative” (DSMRI). As we articulated in a previous editorial, the initiative aimed to bolster the contributions of JRST to graduate student education in our field (for details, see Abd-El-Khalick & Zeidler, 2016a). The DSMRI engaged advising professors and their mentored, advanced doctoral students in a multiphase process, which started with students generating individual reviews of an in situ JRST manuscript. This phase was followed by an advisor-facilitated, comparative analysis of the student manuscript reviews and disposition with the official reviews and editorial decision, and student application of understandings of research literature and design to address editorial feedback and devise a plan to improve the manuscript in question. In the past 4 years, 12 science education professors working with teams that involved a total of 37 doctoral students from 14 research universities (all US-based with a single exception) engaged in the DSMRI. Table 1 lists the names and institutional affiliations of participant professors and doctoral students in recognition of the professors' excellence in mentorship and students' thoughtful engagement with the DSMRI. Na'ama Av-Shalom Veronica Cavera Hebbah El-Moslimany Randi Zimmerman Jason Buell Kate Henson Enrique Suarez Becky Swanson Kathryn Batemean LeeAnna Hooper Yann Shiou Ong Carmen Venderhoof Dionysius Gnanakkan Dawnne LePretre Sarah Dannemann Benjamin Heinitz Sarah Hundertmark Julia Sprung Jonathan Osborne (Cohort 1) Greses Joehnk-Pérez Matt Wilsey Lynne Zummo Jonathan Osborne (Cohort 2) Philip Hernandez Klint Kanopka Catherine Lemmi Emily Reigh Kathryn Ribay Lawrence Chu Tatiane Russo-Tait Maximilan Sherard Jessica M Karch Raul Orduna Picon Donna Stokes & Gillian Bayne (Team) Aderinsola Gilbert Romola Bernard Kelly Shepard City University of New York, USA University of Houston, USA University of Montana Western Illinois Institute of Technology Sule Aksoy Gaye Ceyahn A vision to strengthen JRST's service of our global science education research community was a third core dimension of our editorship. The JRST issues we began publishing in 2016 were wrapped in a new cover design, which we intentionally selected to represent and encode the collective fabric of science education scholarship, binding together varied voices from around the globe, making our community stronger than the sum of our individual threads (see Abd-El-Khalick & Zeidler, 2016b). Beyond form, and driven by our commitment to the global stage, we worked to bolster international representation on the JRST leadership team, especially in the role of associate editors (AEs) and editorial board members (EBMs), as well as in terms of the research published in JRST. Non-US based AEs and EBMs from diverse national origins and cultures bring to bear valuable perspectives, as well as diverse research foci and agendas, significant contextual concerns and questions, and epistemological and research traditions. Finally, in addition to providing high quality reviews, we were keen to ensure a smooth and fair, as well as timely, experience for all JRST submitting authors. In particular, we were concerned about a pattern of steadily increasing turn-around times for editorial decisions, especially in the case of highly sought-after peer-reviewed journals like JRST. These increases have often translated in overly lengthy times from submission to publication in a milieu where authors, rightly so, are keen to promptly put their best work before researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Thus, we were committed to substantially reduce the time frame for returning editorial decisions to authors. Indeed, in our editorship proposal to NARST, we noted that we would strive to reduce the time from first submission by authors to first decision by editors to about 4 months. We were convinced that a refereed journal of JRST's caliber, with the added advantage of a relatively short turn-around time for editorial decisions, is more likely to attract and publish high quality research of substantial import from around the globe, further raising the Journal's reputation and impact. Considered holistically, and coupled with the aforementioned trend of increasing yearly JRST submissions, we anticipated that our team would need to address substantial logistical, bandwidth, and workload challenges to ensure we deliver on our core commitments and goals. Indeed, submissions continued their robust growth over the course of our editorship. As Figure 1 shows, JRST's annual new submissions increased by 23% from 431 manuscripts in 2015 to 531 in 2019. Additionally, the number of resubmitted and revised manuscripts saw a more than threefold jump (28–81). We conjecture that the substantial increase in resubmissions is related to the quality of feedback and guidance provided to authors whose initial submissions were not accepted, yet encouraged by timely and detailed feedback, to revise and resubmit their work for further consideration. Thus, the total yearly submissions processed by our team increased by 33% from 459 in 2015 to 612 submissions in 2019. JRST continued to attract scholars from around the globe. Submitting authors came from 85 countries outside the United States. As Figure 2 shows, the largest number of non-US submissions came from Turkey (4%), followed by Germany (3.4%), Spain (3.3%), China (3.1%), Israel (2.6%), Australia (2.5%), Taiwan (2.1%), Canada (1.9%), United Kingdom (1.8%), India (1.5%), South Africa (1.4%), Brazil (1.2%), Sweden (1.1%), and Indonesia (1%). Beyond these more frequently represented nations, we received submissions from 71 additional countries. We name all these countries here to recognize submitting authors and celebrate the expanse of science education researchers around the globe: Albania, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Bhutan, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, State of Palestine, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. As noted above, the shift to online submissions in 2005 removed several barriers and boosted the number of manuscripts received from outside the United States. JRST co-editors Randy McGinnis and Angelo Collins (2005–2009) reported that, in 2007, non-US based manuscripts accounted for 38% of all submissions (McGinnis & Collins, 2008). This percentage continued to increase during the McGinnis–Collins editorship and then under the Calabrese Barton–Krajcik editorship (2010–2014) nearing 50%. However, throughout our editorship, this percentage did not increase further and hovered around the 50% mark (with a 50.61% overall average during the 5-year editorship). It remains to be seen whether the steadying of this trend is reflective of some underlying global research capacity in the field of science education, or whether we could yet see further increases in non-US based submissions under the Sadler–Mensah editorship (2020–2024). To briefly recap, we aimed to maintain and improve the significance, rigor, impact, and contribution of JRST publications. To that end, our team was committed to ensuring that we provide rich and high-quality feedback on each submission that is put through the double-blind peer review process, and increasing representation for JRST's leadership from non-US based colleagues and the number of JRST publications coming from outside the United States. We aimed to achieve these goals while substantially reducing the turn-around time frame for the review process, cognizant of a pattern of substantive increases in yearly submissions. To maintain fidelity between our aims and their implementation, we adopted three overarching strategies to take on these combined challenges. First, and probably most important, we launched our work with a substantially increased bandwidth of key editorial team members, namely our AEs. The McGinnis–Collins team started their term with nine AEs, which matched the number during the last year of the Baker–Piburn editorship (2000–2004). They ended their term in 2009 with 12 AEs to, no doubt, accommodate the fast growing number of submissions while maintaining a reasonable workload for AEs. Similarly, the Calabrese Barton–Krajcik team started with 13 and ended with 16 AEs. In contrast, we launched with 20 and, within the first year of our term, increased to 22 AEs, a number that we maintained throughout our term. We brought together a team of AEs who are accomplished science education scholars, both emerging and established, with robust records of refereed journal publications, varied editorial experiences, visible leadership in the field, and extensive engagement with NARST. We also worked to bolster the participation of non-US based AEs, who were seven strong over the 5-year editorship. They came from virtually every continent and region around the globe that have especially been engaged with NARST and JRST including Eastern Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East (or Western Asia), and Australia. In any given year, our AEs included five or six international colleagues. As we had to replace a number of AEs over the years because of emerging professional responsibilities and personal circumstances, 29 AEs in total served JRST. We, and our entire community, are in their debt: Without their dedicated (uncompensated) service, the Journal could not have all the work to publish research. We also an and to the quality of our review process. We an with a field to every EBMs each year the time of the NARST annual each We managed annual for and did for to address submissions with a growing focus on and use of advanced and research The was members with about non-US based our global steadily increasing submissions, and our to not on EBMs to review manuscripts a We are for the thoughtful and contributions of no than EBMs who served JRST during our editorship. feedback and with substantive contributions from our AEs, were to the quality of published and focus on JRST's educative we promptly worked to and every of the and and that all these within ScholarOne We any need for authors, and editorial team members to with or use outside this one system. We this in and with ScholarOne These while in and important, a significant role in us to achieve several key goals. we were to every within ScholarOne Manuscripts™ to by and to ensure the and quality of the review and editorial decision we new data to address in the double-blind review process, the of and peer The several field maintained in JRST's and by were often and given the volume of submissions, review turn-around that we and for varied as we continued to attract submissions from theoretical research and The of tools, which are ScholarOne the process. The for the and from among of diverse and as well as national the of in the science education research community. In addition to these enable the of by publication and with those to First, we are very to report that we have and our initial goal to substantially reduce to 4 the time from first of submission to first decision. Figure that in the first of the editorship, during which we started to the and our entire team the use of ScholarOne Manuscripts™ tools, we to first decision. However, in the second of the time to first decision was to a which we maintained throughout the of our editorship. While surely not the full of experiences with JRST submissions. analyses that of all first decisions were within and of all these decisions were within from the of first of all submitting authors received a first decision within from the of first To be the best of our team, this was not the experience of every single who a manuscript to JRST over the course of our years, and this is we made and in terms of our goal to increase the number of non-US based published in JRST, which is a key dimension of our commitment to global science education research. As Figure 4 shows, the percentage of JRST published that and and by non-US based authors steadily increased from in 2016 to 50% in This percentage was in 2020 more than that in In this be noted that the percentage of non-US based submissions throughout our editorship around the 50% mark of all the manuscripts we received in any given Additionally, while we of the JRST for that did not any role in our editorial These decisions were based on the significance, rigor, and impact of manuscripts as by the double-blind review process. while the total number of submissions increased by 33% during our editorship, the JRST its of about these data that we saw a increase in publication to non-US submissions. This increase in could be to our focus and about the global focus of JRST and NARST see & and a editorial decision time which more authors and high-quality submissions from around the the diversity of and of our non-US based AEs and or the of quality feedback and guidance our authors to substantially improve their or some of all these Here, be emphasized that the increase in the number of non-US published in JRST no impact on the number of US-based publications, because the publication in that no on JRST any yearly publication in terms of total or total journal probably most important, in terms of the substantial we in editorial decisions, did not have any on the rigor, or performance of the from by all JRST continued to and well over the course of our 5-year editorship. To as Figure shows, continued on their robust an increasing for JRST increased by a substantial from in 2016 to in 2019, and are well on their way for yet increase in This pattern also to the total yearly JRST which increased every year over the course of our editorship. Figure a of in the total number of for 2016 to a prior of in Beyond that, the number of total continued to steadily total increased by from in 2016 to in 2019. the total in 2020 is to increase well that in 2019. Finally, JRST's impact also continued its robust Journal impact is the most visible and for authors and research and is a key of a in indexing As Figure shows, the JRST impact by from in 2016 to in 2019. JRST to be by all indexing as the among all science education research journals the globe. We have now passed on the care of JRST to an editorial team, which was selected a and process by the NARST We JRST, and our global science education research community continued and, impact. the doubt, is that the the very of around the globe are on science, most important,

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