Economies Inclusion in the Web of Science and Changes in Its Review Process

Economies is entering its third year of existence and an impressive amount of high-quality research has already been published. It is fair to say that Economies has already established itself as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal. This promising development is mirrored by the fact that Economies will be covered by Web of Science (http://wokinfo.com/) in its newly created Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), starting in November 2015. Since journals in ESCI must have passed an initial editorial evaluation by Thomson Reuters, being responsible for the Web of Science, the coverage of Economies in the ESCI can be considered as a quality label. It also means that Economies will be considered for inclusion in other products of the Web of Science in the future.

According to Thomson Reuters, the ESCI will extend the universe of publications in Web of Science to include high-quality, peer-reviewed publications of regional importance and in emerging scientific fields. For authors and researchers planning to submit their research output to Economies this implies that their publication in our journal is searchable, discoverable, and citable. Authors and researchers get real-time insight into Economies’ citation performance, while the content is also considered for inclusion in the other Web of Science collections. Our authors can measure the contribution of their article and can identify potential collaborators for expanded research.

It is our aim to continuously improve the quality of Economies. One important element for the quality is the design of the review process. Starting in September 2015, Economies will modify the process. We will switch to a double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the whole review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. However, we will provide the option that the review reports can be published alongside the article, at the author’s discretion, and reviewers can choose to sign their reviews, i.e., disclose their name together with the review report. We believe that is a significant improvement in the review process, which further increases the quality of Economies and its attractiveness for authors. On behalf of the Editorial Board of Economies, I kindly invite you to take the opportunity and submit articles to Economies and share the results of your academic research with a broad interested audience.