Journal Editor

What a scientific journal editor does

A journal editor is a person holding operational editorial authority over a journal or over specific submissions to it — as distinct from simply sitting on the journal’s editorial board roster, or from acting as an invited peer reviewer on a single manuscript. Editorial authority is exercised over three main things: which submissions move forward through review, who reviews them, and which manuscripts are ultimately accepted, rejected, or returned for revision. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) places responsibility for selecting appropriate reviewers, and for ensuring reviewers can access the material they need to evaluate a manuscript, squarely on the editor handling that submission — and is explicit that “a peer-reviewed journal is under no obligation to follow reviewer recommendations”: the editor makes the final call and may diverge from what reviewers advised in either direction.

Editor-in-chief vs. associate/handling editor

Most journals split editorial work across a small hierarchy rather than concentrating it in one person:

• Editor-in-chief (sometimes co-editors-in-chief) — holds overall responsibility for the journal: its scope and aims, editorial policy (for example adopting a data-availability or authorship-dispute policy), final authority over contested or high-stakes decisions, and oversight of the other editors’ work. The editor-in-chief is typically the person a journal’s ethics cases and appeals ultimately escalate to, and is the point of contact for a publisher or society on matters of editorial independence.
• Associate editor / handling editor / section editor — assigned specific incoming submissions, usually within a subject area or manuscript type. This is the role doing most of the day-to-day editorial work: inviting and tracking peer reviewers, managing conflicts of interest among reviewers, deciding how many review rounds a manuscript needs, and recommending or directly making an accept/reject/major-revision/minor-revision decision, depending on how much decision authority the journal delegates to that role versus reserving for the editor-in-chief.
• Guest editor — a time-limited role, most often for a special issue or themed collection, that takes on handling-editor-style responsibilities for a defined set of submissions without joining the standing editorial team.

Exact titles, reporting lines, and how much decision-making authority is delegated to associate/handling editors versus reserved for the editor-in-chief vary by journal and publisher — there is no single universal structure — but this operational split (one person or small group setting overall direction; a larger rotating group handling individual submissions) is common across most reputable journals.

How this differs from editorial board membership

An editorial board is the journal’s governance body as a whole — it sets editorial policy and provides oversight, and editors (editor-in-chief, associate editors) are typically drawn from or answerable to it. But board membership and the editor role are not the same thing: many board members are listed on a journal’s masthead in an oversight or advisory capacity without ever being assigned a manuscript to handle, while some journals also draw peer reviewers from outside the board entirely. Holding the title “editor” implies active, submission-level or policy-level operational authority; sitting on the board does not, by itself, imply either. Conversely, being invited to review a single manuscript does not make someone an editor: a peer reviewer evaluates the paper they were sent, but does not select other reviewers, manage the submission’s workflow, or hold the accept/reject authority an editor exercises. See editorial contribution for how this kind of editorial work is recognized and credited separately from authorship or peer-review credit.

Editors and the peer-review process

Editors set up and run the review that a manuscript goes through, but usually do not perform that review themselves. Per ICMJE’s guidance on submission and peer-review responsibilities, the editor handling a manuscript selects reviewers with relevant expertise, manages conflicts of interest in that selection, keeps manuscript details confidential (sharing them only with the authors and invited reviewers), and — unless local retention rules require otherwise — is expected to delete copies of rejected manuscripts rather than keep them indefinitely. See peer review and peer reviewer for how the reviewer side of that process works, and how to know if an article is peer reviewed for how this editorial infrastructure signals a journal’s legitimacy to readers.

Editors and publication ethics

Journal editors are also the frontline decision-makers on ethics questions — suspected plagiarism, authorship disputes, data-integrity concerns, and requests for correction or retraction. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), founded in 1997 by a group of UK medical journal editors, publishes editor-facing guidance and flowcharts specifically for this role, covering how an editor should work through a suspected-misconduct case or an image-manipulation concern toward a correction, expression of concern, or retraction. This ethics-handling responsibility sits with editors rather than with peer reviewers or ordinary board members, which is part of why editorial titles carry more formal accountability than board membership alone.

Related terms

• Editorial board — the governance body an editor typically sits within or answers to.
• Editorial contribution — how editorial work, including the editor role, is recognized and credited.
• ICMJE — publishes the widely-referenced roles-and-responsibilities guidance for editors in the submission and peer-review process.
• Peer review — the process journal editors set up and oversee.
• Peer reviewer — the invited role editors select and manage, distinct from the editor role itself.