The History of the Snowman

I just finished reading The History of the Snowman. What a great and humorous collection of the authors' track to hunt down the first recorded snowman in history.

How do editors make decisions?

Writing Eloquent Science and being an editor since 2004 and a chief editor since 2008 had got me wondering how editors make decisions and what are the factors and what affects rejection rate? As a result, I wrote two articles on the topic.

• Schultz, D. M., 2010: Rejection rates for journals publishing atmospheric science. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., to appear February 2010.
  
• Schultz, D. M., 2009: Are three heads better than two? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior affect the rejection rate. Scientometrics, doi: 10.1007/s11192-009-0084-0. [PDF]
  

Researching these papers, I came across literature written by Prof. Lutz Bornmann at ETH in Zurich on editors and decision making. Recently, I've had email conversations with him, exchanging ideas and articles. If this topic interest you, I highly recommend Lutz Bornmann's articles.

Although his CV is quite impressive, his most recent research has focused on the decision making of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, but he is now moving onto study of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, was the highest ranked journal in Meteorology and Atmospheric Science according to the ISI Web of Science.