Editor’s Notes

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21301
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Mark A. Hager

EDITOR'S NOTES

The New Year brings new blood and enthusiasm to the editorial board, along with the new articles

and research notes you will find in this issue of the journal. With the dawning of 2018, I welcomed

Jeffrey Brudney and Wolfgang Bielefeld to the board. Jeff is on faculty at the University of North

Carolina-Wilmington and has served previous terms on this editorial board. Wolf is retired from

Indiana University (IUPUI), but still teaches and guides research as an affiliate at the University of

Minnesota. Both are former editors of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and bring a wealth

of experience. I am thrilled to have them aboard.

In this editorial, however, I find myself looking back to the end of 2017. In my last editorial, I

thanked Angela Bies as she rolled off the editorial board of Nonprofit Management & Leadership. I

now add my thanks for the work and guidance provided by Beth Gazley, who also ended her edito-

rial board term at the end of 2017. The end of the year is always momentous, since the journal

makes its annual paper award at the November ARNOVA meeting. This time, I had the pleasure of

handing the plaque to Jiahuan Lu for his 2016 article “The Philanthropic Consequences of Govern-

ment Grants to Nonprofit Organizations”—a meta-analysis of articles that report on the relationship

between receipt of government grants and receipt of private donations. Congratulations, Jiahuan!

That ARNOVA meeting also provided me the opportunity to participate on a professional devel-

opment panel organized by Jennifer Mosley. The session focused on journal reviews, both writing

them and responding to them. I was skeptical that people would choose this room, but it was well-

attended. Preparation for this panel gave me the opportunity to organize my thoughts and experience

regarding peer reviews, something I had not done before in a systematic way. Reviewers for papers

submitted for presentation at the Academy of Management annual meeting are encouraged to read

three essays on academic peer reviews, so I downloaded those papers and absorbed them before

organizing my own thoughts. Those three papers are in the reference list, below.

The following five points include the introspections that I presented in the ARNOVA session,

with a few amplifications. My hope is that they will provide some insights into how to write reviews

that are useful to both editors and authors.

1|WRITING HELPFUL PEER REVIEWS

1. Say “yes”to review requests. Of course, you only have so much time for professional service,

and only you can decide whether reviewing for a given journal is worth the commitment of time

and energy. However, prospective reviewers sometimes decline to review because they consider

themselves proficient in a narrow swath of the field and feel that a given topic is outside their

expertise. My suggestion is that you trust your editors and trust yourself. The editor may well

be inviting you to a panel for reasons that are not immediately apparent to you. You do not have

to be expert in all elements of a manuscript: a good panel has the diversity to cover methodolog-

ical, theoretical, and substantive dimensions of a given manuscript. When you agree to review,

you help an editor fill out a panel that covers this ground.

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21301

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