We are honored to serve as co-Editors-in-Chief of International Organization from July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2027. Our team also includes two excellent associate editors, B. Peter Rosendorff, Professor of Politics at New York University and Ayşe Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Elana Matthews, who has served as IO's managing editor since 2012, remains in her post, providing valuable continuity. While the current issue and the next several issues include articles accepted by the previous editorial team, we are now managing all manuscripts.
We are fortunate to lead a journal with a well-deserved reputation for an efficient and high-quality review process and outstanding content. Our predecessor, Erik Voeten, Peter F. Krogh Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and his trio of Associate Editors, Martha Finnemore, University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University; Kenneth Scheve, Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University; and Kenneth Schultz, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, deserve much credit for handling an ever-increasing number of manuscripts with care and expedience. Elana Matthews has kept everything, from submission to review to production, running on time. We are grateful to all of them for their good judgment, effective management, and assistance in our transition.
International Organization (IO) seeks to publish the best and most innovative scholarly manuscripts on international relations. IO features articles that propose generalizable theories, improve social scientific knowledge, and/or offer new empirical insights. Our team aims to publish excellent theoretical and empirical work, both on important topics long featured in International Organization and on emerging topics that deserve increased emphasis. While manuscripts that do not feature any international, transnational, or cross-border phenomenon as a major cause or effect are outside the domain of IO, the range of topics that should be studied from an international perspective is broad and growing. We hope to attract submissions that include—but also expand our scope beyond—the traditional categories of international political economy, international security, international institutions, and international order. We hope to review and publish work that employs a wide range of methodological approaches and that emanates from a range of theoretical traditions.
Our editorial team also believes that diverse scholarly voices enhance our discipline and the quality of our collective scholarship. We aim to attract submissions from scholars based around the globe, so that we may broaden the geographic range of the authors whose work appears in IO. We also hope to receive more submissions from members of traditionally underrepresented demographic groups. We continue to remind authors of the importance of being inclusive in identifying and citing existing scholarly research.
We continue to accept three types of manuscript submissions: research articles (maximum 14,000 words), research notes (maximum 8,000 words), and review essays (maximum 14,000 words). Research notes generally have a narrower scope than research articles. They need not be primarily empirical contributions; they also can be primarily theoretical or conceptual. Review essays survey new developments in a particular area of study, offering new synthesis. We encourage you to review our complete Instructions to Authors online.
We are committed to the ethical conduct of research. As part of the submission process, corresponding authors are required to answer questions regarding their adherence to ethical research principles, including those related to human participants. Authors are also asked to disclose any competing interests and to disclose funding sources for their research.
IO employs a double-blind review process. Submitted articles first undergo a technical assessment, designed to check for conformity with submission guidelines and author anonymity. IO's Conflict of Interest policy prohibits an editorial team member who has a conflict with any of the manuscript's authors (for instance, currently working or studying at the same institution, a current or recent co-author, or a former graduate student) from any involvement with or capacity to access the manuscript. We ask that corresponding authors disclose any potential conflicts as part of the submission process. Conflicts of interest are noted by our managing editor, and the broader policy (as well as issues related to its implementation) is overseen by IO's Ethics Committee.
After the technical and conflict of interest checks, each manuscript is assigned to a member of our editorial team. The assigned editor reads the manuscript to determine whether the manuscript is appropriate for peer review. The enormous increases in submissions that most journals have experienced in recent years, along with the continued dislocations related to the COVID-19 pandemic, have challenged the peer-review system. Given that we anticipate receiving approximately 600 submissions per year, we are committed to engaging our reviewers’ efforts where we think they are most productive. The previous editorial team sent about sixty percent of the manuscripts they received out for review. We anticipate a similar practice, which will allow us to provide a quick decision to authors when we determine that a submission is not suited for publication in International Organization. Doing so allows the author to move on to other outlets without delay and conserves our scarce reviewer resources for those manuscripts that are most likely to fit IO's substantive scope and meet its reviewers’ theoretical and methodological expectations.
For those manuscripts sent out for review, the relevant editor selects all reviewers. We rely heavily on members of the IO Editorial Board; approximately one-third of the manuscripts sent out for review are reviewed by at least one board member. Like other journals, we also rely on the broader scholarly community to serve as reviewers, and we appreciate reviewers’ willingness to provide anonymous, constructive, and timely feedback.
We recognize the need for diversity not only in the substantive focus of manuscripts and the demographic features of authors, but also in our reviewer pool. We continue to update and expand our reviewer database; we encourage those who would like to review for IO but have not been invited to contact us. When reviews are completed and we make an editorial decision, we share the decision as well as the reviews with the corresponding author and with all reviewers.
In the spirit of providing an efficient review process, we aim to invite authors to revise manuscripts only when we, as editors, deem the manuscript to have a strong probability of ultimate success. This does not mean that a “revise and resubmit” decision is a guarantee of eventual acceptance; rather, it suggests that we are judicious in our evaluation of manuscripts and our assessment of reviewers’ feedback. We accept only about five percent of the manuscripts submitted to IO. For those manuscripts that we are unable to accept, we aim for a review process that provides constructive feedback and helps to move papers toward publication elsewhere.
All manuscripts that employ formal models or quantitative data undergo an in-house verification process before final manuscript acceptance. We require that all data and code for quantitative analysis is posted on the IO Dataverse prior to online publication. We also encourage authors of papers using qualitative data to be as transparent as possible about their research methodology and—within the constraints of ethical considerations—to provide as much information as is feasible to allow others to verify their claims and replicate their methods.
One of the many changes in academic publishing concerns the way in which content is created and accessed. Gone are the days when colleagues become aware of new research when it arrived in an issue table of contents email (or a paper issue of a journal!). Readers of an article often have little idea of what other articles appear in the same issue, and journal publishers increasingly count article views and downloads rather than subscriber numbers. FirstView has greatly shortened the time between acceptance and appearance of final articles, and social media allows authors to publicize and share their findings.
These changes are especially useful for research that has important implications for contemporary governance challenges, as much of what is published in IO does. We publicize new articles using IO's social media accounts (twitter: @IntOrgJournal; facebook: International Organization). We also encourage authors to share their research using social media, blog posts, and press releases.
Unlike most other journals, IO is not associated with a professional association or owned directly by a publisher, but rather is owned and operated by the IO Foundation. The thirty-eight person IO Editorial Board, currently chaired by Helen Milner, B.C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, is elected independently of the editorial team and is responsible not only for advising the Editors but also for governing the IO Foundation. Jon Pevehouse, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serves as Chief Financial Officer of the IO Foundation, helping us to steward IO's resources effectively. David Mainwaring, Executive Publisher for Social Science Journals at Cambridge University Press, will continue to work with us to navigate the landscape of academic publishing, which currently faces many challenges. We appreciate the partnership of the IO Board and Cambridge University Press over the next five years.
We look forward to the opportunity to read and review a great deal of excellent research during our term. IO will continue to provide authors with a timely, fair, and constructive review process and to disseminate scholarship aimed at improving our understanding of international relations and global politics broadly.
