**Objective** Editorial decisions can depend on factors, like the
timing of submissions or the matching of editors and
reviewers, that are independent of the quality of the work.
This analysis investigates associations of these and other
external factors with editorial outcomes at eLife, a major
biomedical journal.

**Design** This study analyzed whether timing of submission
(weekend vs weekday) was associated with the decision to
send manuscripts for external review among senior editors,
who can desk-reject submissions; compared peer review
manuscript ratings by reviewer volume; and assessed whether
submission time of month or year, preceding decisions to
reject or review a manuscript, and matching of reviewer to
manuscript specialty influenced editorial decisions. Data were
analyzed by single variable regression.

**Results** Between January 2016 and December 2018 eLife
received 23,190 total submissions, 6498 of which were sent
for review. Among senior editors (n = 65), proportions of
manuscripts sent for external review ranged from 9.6% to
49.3% and were statistically significantly lower on weekends
(mean, 24% [SD, 1.3%]) than on weekdays (mean, 29% [SD,
0.6%]; P < .001), an association observed for most senior
editors. Average peer reviewer rating (range, 0-1) increased
with volume category: mean of 0.453 (SD, 0.003) for 1 to 5
submission reviews; 0.463 (SD, 0.008) for 6 to 10
submissions; and 0.472 (SD, 0.007) for 11 or more
submissions, and reviewers’ ratings increased with successive
reviews. In a nonquantitative inspection of submission and
decision trends, submission time of month or year, preceding
decisions to reject or review a manuscript, and matching of
reviewer to manuscript specialty did not appear to influence
editorial decisions.

**Conclusions** This study found a statistically significant
association between timing of submission during the week
and editorial decisions. Peer reviewer ratings increased with
review volume. Submission time of month or year, preceding
decisions to reject or review a manuscript, and matching of reviewer to manuscript specialty did not appear to influence
editorial decisions.

**Conflict of Interest Disclosures** None reported.

**Funding/Support** This research is supported by National Science
Foundation SCISIPBIO (A Science of Science Policy Approach to
Analyzing and Innovating the Biomedical Research Enterprise)
project 2022435.

**Additional Information** We thank Andy Collings and James
Gilbert from eLife for sharing the data and providing explanations
and eLife’s editorial leadership team for input and suggestions.

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/7aad5dd3d2641b2ae252900ca6469e10.png)

Analysis of Timing of Manuscript Submissions and Assignment of Editors and Reviewers on Editorial Decisions at eLife

Open-domain dialog systems have a user-centric goal: to provide humans with an engaging conversation experience. User engagement is one of the most important metrics for evaluating open-domain dialog systems, and could also be used as real-time feedback to benefit dialog policy learning. Existing work on detecting user disengagement typically requires hand-labeling many dialog samples. We propose HERALD, an efficient annotation framework that reframes the training data annotation process as a denoising problem. Specifically, instead of manually labeling training samples, we first use a set of labeling heuristics to label training samples automatically. We then denoise the weakly labeled data using the Shapley algorithm. Finally, we use the denoised data to train a user engagement detector. Our experiments show that HERALD improves annotation efficiency significantly and achieves 86% user disengagement detection accuracy in two dialog corpora.

HERALD: An Annotation Efficient Method to Detect User Disengagement in Social Conversations

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11A: Dialog and Interactive Systems #6

technical paper

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

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Weixin Liang

2

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Analysis of Timing of Manuscript Submissions and Assignment of Editors and Reviewers on Editorial Decisions at eLife

HERALD: An Annotation Efficient Method to Detect User Disengagement in Social Conversations

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