Editorial
A year in review
Volume 1, Issue 8 Editorial
As we enter 2021, the HKS Misinformation Review completes its first year as a journal dedicated to publishing work of the highest quality from across the misinformation field on a compressed publication schedule. In our first year, we received more submissions than we possibly could have anticipated, and we send our gratitude to all the authors who chose the HKS Misinformation Review as a venue for their research and intellectual exchange. Our website was visited by over 200,000 unique users and our work picked up by popular media outlets like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°. An important measure of success of a specialist journal is also the reception it receives from the scientific and professional community that willed it into being. This reception has been loud and clear: The journal is fulfilling its mission of providing a high-quality forum for innovative, interdisciplinary research and cutting-edge commentary about mis- and disinformation phenomena worldwide.
We are grateful to everyone who helped make the HKS Misinformation Review a success in its first year, including our editorial board, authors, peer reviewers, interns and, of course, our generous funders, including the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Schuster Media and Technology Endowment Fund. We also look forward to your continued support as we continue to grow and reach an even wider audience from around the world.
Making an impact – HKS Misinformation Review, Volume 1
From January 1 through December 31, 2020, the HKS Misinformation Review received 174 submissions, of which 49 were ultimately accepted for publication. Of those those, 37 were peer-reviewed research articles, 9 were evidence-based commentaries, and 3 were peer-reviewed research notes. For empirical research submissions, 18 were rejected without peer review. Some rejections were accompanied with guidance from the editor to encourage future submission of a manuscript that would have greater prospects of receiving favorable reviews, oftentimes requiring new data collection efforts and/or further theoretical development.
109 manuscripts were sent out for peer review. Among those that underwent the peer review process, 24 (22 percent) were rejected outright and 85 (78 percent) received an invitation to revise and resubmit. No submissions were accepted unconditionally. We are grateful to our reviewers for their work, and want to express our sincere appreciation for their insightful critiques, suggestions, and ability to help us see issues from multiple perspectives. Their reports are essential parts of our editorial evaluations of submitted manuscripts and help us to make informed decisions so that we can ensure that the research we publish in the HKS Misinformation Review is of the highest quality. We are also very proud to be working with a truly international peer reviewer community who represent academia’s disciplinary, geographic, and institutional diversity.
The majority of manuscripts received to date are from contributors based in the United States (roughly 60 percent). Other submissions have come from the UK, Canada, India, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, Australia, France, Ghana, Iraq, Iran, Cameroon, China, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Bangladesh, UAE and Switzerland. Our global reach is highlighted once again in this issue (Issue 8) where we present five papers from 57 authors in 10 different countries, including Brazil, Israel, Turkey, and China.
As an Open Access journal, readers can instantly access articles and download them from the journal website free of charge. The website statistics are testimony to the popularity of our articles, with many of them achieving several hundreds of downloads to date. We are pleased to say the most read article in 2020 was Uscinski et al.’s Why do people believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories? which appeared in Volume 1, Issue 3 with a total of 621 unique pageviews. We look forward to seeing the pageviews translate into citations in the near future. Our most cited article was Kathleen H. Jamieson and Dolores Albarracin’s The Relation between Media Consumption and Misinformation at the Outset of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in the US (37 citations), also published in Volume 1, Issue 3.
Being Open Access, also means that journalists and the media have easy and instant access to our work. Our short-form format, along with our emphasis on clear and straightforward language, and real-world implications and applications of research findings, also ensures that our publications reach the broadest possible audience. Within five months of launching, our work had been picked up by popular media outlets like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, NBC News and The Washington Post. Our articles have been mentioned in The Economist, Scientific American, Fast Company, Daily Mail, Vice, Psychology Today and the New York Post, along with many local media, such as the Philly Voice, The Seattle Times, and the Montreal Gazette.
2020 in a snapshot
Total Number of Submissions Received: 174
Number of Articles Reviewed: 109
Number of Articles Published: 49
Average Time From Submission to Publication: 10 weeks/ 2.5 months
Average No. of Articles Published Each Month: 4
Number of Individual Journal Subscribers: 1,838
Number of Journal Pageviews: 359,320
Number of Website Users: 205,575
Future plans
A new journal demands constant attention and nurturing. In 2021, we aim to get the Journal indexed in well-reputed databases, including the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and EBSCO. Indexing will increase our visibility, which will lead to more citations and wider interest in individual articles. 2021 will also see the launch of our new, open-source manuscript submission and management system, which will make it easier for authors to submit their work and check the status of their manuscripts online. Finally, we will continue to make revisions and updates to our author guidelines to provide more guidance to prospective authors.
Your support matters
We urge you to continue to support HKS Misinformation Review. You can do this in a number of ways including citing articles published in the HKS Misinformation Review, submitting papers to the HKS Misinformation Review, serving as a peer reviewer for the HKS Misinformation Review, recommending the HKS Misinformation Review to your colleagues, and finally downloading and reading articles in the HKS Misinformation Review. Support is needed to further build the profile of the HKS Misinformation Review.