HPI: What does the editor-in-chief of a scientific journal do?
Prof. Naumann: The editor-in-chief of a scientific journal is responsible for all the content published in it. The scientific articles must be thematically appropriate, novel, relevant and, of course, factually correct. To achieve these goals, editors-in-chief have three tasks: They have to encourage scientists to submit articles and, if necessary, also suggest topics; they oversee quality assurance, in particular the review of manuscripts by other experienced researchers; and they should disseminate the published articles, because one measure of a journal's success is the number of citations, i.e. mentions in other scientific papers. Incidentally, work for scientific journals is usually unpaid. This applies to all those who submit articles or review papers, as well as to the editors-in-chief themselves. Such activities are considered a natural service to the scientific community.
HPI: What criteria are used to select publications for the ACM JDIQ?
Prof. Naumann: JDIQ stands for "Journal of Data and Information Quality", so it's about data and information quality. First of all, publications must fit thematically. This includes many sub-areas such as measuring quality, cleansing data, but also papers on the organizational assurance of data quality in a company. In addition, there are field reports, overview papers that summarize a sub-area, as well as invited articles by particularly outstanding scientists. The manuscripts usually reach us directly from people who already know the journal and are happy to publish their own work in it. Sometimes, however, we directly invite researchers to report on the data quality aspects of their work. This is because data quality is a cross-cutting topic that plays a role in many areas of computer science and other sciences.
HPI: What role does the journal play for research in your field?
Prof. Naumann: As the world's only high-quality journal on the subject of data quality, JDIQ is an important source of publications on new ideas and processes. The quality of data is particularly important for the new AI systems: only systems that are trained with high-quality data can also deliver high-quality results. The journal's focus has therefore recently become particularly relevant. And: in this context, we take a broad view of the topic and also publish many papers on ethical issues in connection with AI.
HPI: How can the quality of the published articles be assured?
Prof. Naumann: Every article goes through a careful review process. First, we check the relevance of the submitted article for our journal. Then we check for plagiarism. Together with experienced associate editors, we then look for at least three suitable researchers to write a review of the paper. Many articles are rejected at this stage, but receive constructive feedback to improve the research and the manuscript. The best articles are usually revised based on the reviews and published after a further review by the same reviewers.
