I'm the editor in chief of a new academic journal called Creator and Influencer Studies.

I'm the editor in chief of a new academic journal called Creator and Influencer Studies, and I just had a submission come in, so I thought I would take you guys along with me and talk about what this process now looks like. My name is Jess, I'm a social media professor, researcher, and teacher at the University of Georgia and the editor in chief of a new Springer Nature academic journal called Creator and Influencer Studies. We are the world's first journal devoted to all things studies of the creator and influencer economies and to demystify this process of peer review and what happens when you submit a journal to me. I knocked over my lipstick. Let's demystify the process of what happens when you submit something to me and what I do now. Obviously, I cannot show you anything because of privacy concerns and to keep the anonymity of peer review, but I will talk about what I'm doing as I go along. The first thing that happens is I get an email from the publisher saying that I have been assigned a new submission. This just means something has come in, it has passed the automated quality check, and now it has come to the desk. And so other publishers may do this differently, but the Springer Nature quality check process takes a little while, so typically, once you submit it, I don't see it for at least seven days. I've been alerted, now let's go look at the submission. This now takes me to my homepage, which has tasks and submissions and analytics for the journal. First things first, I now have to read the paper to assess suitability. This is basically where I, one, make sure it fits the scope of the journal. I have had to desk reject a couple of articles so far, mainly because they don't engage at all with content creator and influencer studies, but are considering social media more broadly. I'm very grateful for those people for even considering this as an outlet for their work in the first place. Assessing suitability also matters because this is where I see if there is, you know, any plagiarism issues, any of those paper mill issues I've talked about, hallucinated citations and things like that. Hallucinated citations are such a huge problem right now, but I'll do a whole other video about that. All right, I have read the article. I deem it as passing suitability assessment because it fits the scope of the journal. Uh, so now I will move to finding peer reviewers for this. The Springer Nature system is quite good at this because as soon as I click search reviewers, thematically based on the paper and kind of topically, it suggests thousands of potential reviewers for me. The problem here is that it does typically only go topically and thematically, not methodologically, so sometimes when I've had a paper that is one thing, but really doing a totally different methodology, I really have to search to find, but that's part of the fun. I actually kind of enjoy this process right now to like get this bird's eye view of who's doing what. I'm sure I'll get tired at some point, but I'm enjoying it right now. Searching reviewers in the system here, I also get to add reviewers to a short list, so I get to kind of, you know, make a condensed list of everybody I want to invite. This is very useful in the event that, uh, reviewers say no or ghost me. And I'm begging you, um, please don't ghost your journal request. I have learned from doing this that this moves faster if you say no, because then that means I could go in faster and find a new reviewer, rather than waiting for like the 10 day window to expire. And okay, I will say the first page of like the thousands of potential reviewers for this paper are not particularly good, so I'm going to go to that paper's citations and look who are they citing to then reach out to potential reviewers that way. All right, I have my five people on my shortlist, I've ranked them based on how I believe they thematically align with the paper, and now I'm going to send out my invites. So yeah, that's kind of what the process is. Let me know what questions you have down below.