I'm editing 3 academic peer-review journals. I would like to know what must a scientific editor know and what should he/she do for the journal? What are his/her roles in the journals. For example, I control the references so that they are correct. Should he/she control the methodology? How about structure? What Should he/she control?
1. You should have sufficiently advanced and broad knowledge of the field(s) covered by the journal, so that you can assist whenever there is any doubt from the referees' comments whether a manuscript eventually should be accepted for publication in the journal. (Checking that references are correct does not sound like the right thing for an editor to do, by the way.)
2. You should keep a close eye on the development of the journal over time, so that it does not deteriorate in quality. "Quality" is measured in many ways, of course, and counting citations is not the most important. Whether the papers in the journal gets cited by papers in OTHER, GOOD journals is of interest, of course.
3. Your should ensure that the papers published in the journal cover - in a fair manner - the topics that define it - that is, do not allow one or two particular sub-fields to dominate the list of publications, but try to balance them. In fact, each issue should be balanced, if that is possible.
4. You should maintain a very high standard of the referees involved. Do not accept sloppy referee reports from anyone.
5. If appropriate publish special issues devoted to a special topic of interest. But do NOT allow those special issues to have a less strict quality control.
6. Invite well established scientists to be members of the board of the journal, meet them regularly to discuss the quality development, and to come up with ideas on improvements. (And special issues.)
It depends on the journal coworkers. Some journals have a methodologists or statistical editor. So in this case, the scientific editor doesn;t need to control the methodology.
In Iran, we have problems with the references. Some are not correct. Some high-ranked journals have specialist which controls the references and give them a link.
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