On Being An Editor by Rawi Ramautar
As academics we devote our time mainly to education and research activities. Some of us are also active as an editor for a scientific journal. For example, I am an editor for Microchemical Journal (from Elsevier, established in 1957) since January 2019, a task I fulfill with pleasure every Saturday morning while my son is having his judo class.
My main responsibilities are to handle the peer-review process of about 300 manuscripts of the 4000 submitted every year and to realize as editorial team an impact factor of 5.0 or higher in 2022. Concerning the latter, we are going in the right direction as the 2020 impact factor of this journal is 4.6 (was 3.6 in 2019 and 3.2 in 2018). As an editor you contribute to scholarship by suggesting topics for special issues and by recruiting work from talented scientists. Taking on an editor position enables you to influence discussions in your research field, and it also helps to further boost your own visibility. My passion for editorial activities is further reflected by editing books, the most recent one just published by the Royal Society of Chemistry on Advanced Mass Spectrometry Tools for Metabolomics (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/ebook/978-1-83916-163-6).
