Journal Editor Responsibilities: Daily Tasks to Strategic Duties

Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board
— PhD academics, peer-reviewed journal editors and medical communication specialists.

Last updated: July 2026 • Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board • Reading time: 8 minutes

Being a journal editor is really two jobs wearing one title. On any given day, an editor might be chasing down a late reviewer report, and in the same afternoon, weighing whether the journal’s scope should expand into an emerging subfield. Understanding both sides of the role — the operational grind and the strategic vision — is essential for anyone stepping into an editorial position, and for anyone trying to evaluate how well a journal is being run.

The Two Faces of Journal Editing

Every academic journal editor operates on two timescales at once. The first is daily and transactional: manuscripts arrive, reviewers need to be found, deadlines slip, authors ask questions. The second is long-term and strategic: the editor is also the custodian of the journal’s reputation, scope, and future direction. New editors often underestimate how much of the job lives in the second category, because it is far less visible than the queue of manuscripts waiting for a decision.

Both halves of the role matter. A journal with flawless day-to-day operations but no strategic direction will stagnate. A journal with an ambitious vision but chaotic submission handling will lose the trust of authors and reviewers. Effective editors learn to move fluidly between the two.

Daily Operational Duties

The operational side of editing is what keeps a journal functioning issue to issue. It is repetitive by design — consistency is what makes a journal’s process predictable and fair to authors.

• Managing submissions intake: New manuscripts need an initial screen for scope fit, completeness, formatting compliance, and basic ethical red flags (such as obvious plagiarism or duplicate submission) before they are sent out for review.
• Assigning reviewers: Identifying two or three qualified reviewers per manuscript, checking for conflicts of interest, and following up when invitations go unanswered is a near-constant task, especially for journals that receive a high volume of submissions.
• Tracking timelines: Editors (or the managing editor supporting them) monitor review deadlines, send reminders, and keep authors informed of where their manuscript stands. Persistent delays are one of the most common author complaints about journals, so timeline discipline directly affects reputation.
• Making first-pass decisions: Reading reviewer comments, weighing conflicting recommendations, and issuing a decision — accept, minor revision, major revision, or reject — with clear, constructive feedback to the author.
• Handling correspondence: Responding to author queries, processing appeals of rejection decisions, and coordinating with the production or copyediting team as accepted manuscripts move toward publication.

None of this is glamorous, but it is the foundation of author trust. Authors judge a journal as much by how it treats their manuscript in transit as by the final decision.

Strategic and Higher-Level Duties

The strategic side of the role is where an editor shapes what the journal becomes over the course of years, not weeks.

• Shaping editorial scope and vision: Deciding which research areas the journal should prioritize, commissioning special issues on emerging topics, and periodically revisiting the journal’s aims and scope statement so it reflects where the field is actually heading.
• Building the editorial board: Recruiting associate editors and section editors with complementary expertise, and periodically refreshing board composition for balance across subfields, career stages, and geography. A COPE guide for new editors recommends that incoming editors use their transition as an opportunity to review and reconfirm the roles and expectations of the entire board.
• Managing reputation and impact strategy: Monitoring citation performance, encouraging editorial choices that favor quality and rigor over sheer volume, and positioning the journal for inclusion in relevant abstracting and indexing databases.
• Handling ethics cases and COPE compliance: Investigating allegations of plagiarism, data fabrication, authorship disputes, or undisclosed conflicts of interest, and following established frameworks — such as those published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) — when deciding on corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions.
• Succession planning: Mentoring associate editors who may eventually take over the editor-in-chief role, and negotiating fixed or renewable appointment terms with the publisher so leadership transitions are planned rather than abrupt.

These duties rarely have hard deadlines, which is exactly why they are easy to neglect. Editors who set aside dedicated time for strategic work — rather than letting the daily queue consume every available hour — tend to leave their journals stronger than they found them.

Editor-in-Chief vs. Associate Editors vs. Managing Editor

Editorial teams are structured differently across publishers and disciplines, but most mid-size and large journals divide responsibility across three broad roles. Understanding the distinction helps clarify who does what — and who a prospective editor might become in time.

In practice, the lines blur at smaller journals, where a single editor-in-chief may perform all three functions with minimal support staff. At larger, high-volume journals, the managing editor role is often a paid, full-time position precisely because the operational workload becomes too large for a volunteer academic to absorb alongside their own research.

Time Management Realities

Most journal editors are practicing researchers, clinicians, or faculty members first, and editors second. Editorial work is frequently unpaid or minimally compensated, which means it competes directly with grant writing, teaching, clinical duties, and the editor’s own publication record.

The time commitment varies enormously by journal size. A niche society journal publishing a few dozen articles a year might require a handful of hours per week. A high-volume journal can easily become a part-time job in its own right. Editors who sustain the role long-term tend to rely on a few consistent habits:

• Delegating triage: Letting a managing editor or editorial assistant handle initial completeness and scope checks before manuscripts reach the editor’s desk.
• Batching decisions: Setting aside dedicated blocks of time for reading reviews and issuing decisions, rather than handling manuscripts piecemeal throughout the week.
• Leaning on associate editors: Distributing manuscripts across section editors so no single person becomes a bottleneck.
• Protecting research time: Treating editorial hours as a fixed, bounded commitment rather than an open-ended obligation that expands to fill all available time.

Editors who don’t set these boundaries early are the ones most likely to burn out or let review timelines slip — which, in turn, damages the journal’s reputation with authors.

Practical Advice for First-Time Editors

Stepping into an editor role for the first time can feel like inheriting a system with no manual. A few practices make the transition smoother:

• Start with an honest audit: Tools like the COPE Journal Audit provide a structured way to assess current policies and identify gaps before making changes.
• Arrange a handover period: Working alongside the outgoing editor, even briefly, transfers institutional knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere.
• Don’t reverse prior decisions without cause: COPE guidance advises new editors not to overturn a predecessor’s acceptance decisions unless serious problems, such as plagiarism or data fabrication, come to light.
• Clarify expectations with the board immediately: Confirm how many manuscripts each associate editor is expected to handle per year, and be willing to restructure the board if commitment levels don’t match the journal’s needs.
• Learn the submission management system inside and out: Editors who understand the technical mechanics of their platform waste far less time on avoidable delays.
• Build a relationship with the publisher: Editorial, production, and marketing contacts at the publisher can clarify what support is available and what constraints exist.
• Keep current with ethics guidance: COPE and ICMJE update their recommendations periodically; new editors benefit from following these directly rather than relying on secondhand summaries.

The editors who thrive longest in the role are rarely the ones who work the most hours — they are the ones who build systems and relationships that make the daily workload sustainable, leaving genuine bandwidth for the strategic decisions that shape a journal’s long-term standing.

Sources

• COPE: A Short Guide to Ethical Editing for New Editors
• COPE Journal Audit
• COPE: Editorial Board Participation Guidance
• ICMJE: Roles and Responsibilities of Authors, Contributors, Reviewers, Editors, Publishers, and Owners
• ICMJE: Journal Owners and Editorial Freedom