Your main intellectual achievement is to create a mentoring, ego-acceptable Development Letter for the authors of all submissions, whether or not you recommend for advancing the paper for publication. You write your development letter as chair of the paper’s ad hoc review committee, using your own best judgment.

All Development Letters need to follow these guidelines:

  1. It speaks with ‘one voice’ (rather than a range of differing views). It is important that comments from different reviewers do not contradict each other.
  2. You may use words from reviewers verbatim without quotes if they are appropriate. At other times, you will need to rephrase the views of the reviewers. A significant aspect of being an editor is synthesizing and determining the most appropriate comments or suggestions to be included.
  3. Write your development letter in supportive, constructive language that avoids harsh criticism. Think of how you would have liked to receive criticism when you were writing your first journal paper and use that tone. Use terms like “this is how you can make your paper even better…”. You had good training from your school experience on how to write journal papers, so please share some of your wisdom with the authors you mentor.
  4. Criticize the paper, not the author. So, word your letter appropriately, and it will have a greater impact. For example, avoid using the word ‘you,’ and instead voicing the advice in terms of revising ‘the paper.’ For example, rather than ‘you need to update the literature review,’ write ‘the literature review will be stronger by adding more recent studies. These might include for example…’
  5. Be sure to include positive comments about what the author did well.
  6. Most importantly, provide feedback that is intended to help the author improve their work:
  • make your comments as clear and detailed as possible and give examples;
  • give feedback that identifies specific problems and is accompanied by practical suggestions for addressing the issues; and
  • provide suggestions for additional relevant references and for an alternative interpretation of results, where possible.

In other words, be a coach, not a referee.

Below are snippets from a Development Letter that illustrate the mentoring approach we ask our editors to take.

Introduction: I recommend that the next revision includes a section with details on the environment that led to the research (economic, political, etc.). Without it, the reader is left to infer details and may infer incorrectly. For example, make it clear if the program was mandated, what funding was available, if and how technology was distributed to schools and students.

Literature Review: Adding a review of Change Theory literature here will provide a stronger basis for the subsequent Results and Findings. A search at http://ISJournals.org can suggest related literature ISI has published. Including more recent references will strengthen the literature review and demonstrate that the paper takes into consideration the most recent developments.

Method/Methodology: Consider rearranging the opening paragraph in this section so that lines 213 to 216 follow line 217. Doing this would improve flow. I recommend that your paper make further justification of the decision to use mixed methods since that would build a stronger case for accepting the results of the analysis. Have the paper explain to the reader what a mixed methods study does that quantitative method alone cannot. This justification might well fit as part of the Literature Review.

We recommend that you compose your Development Letter offline and then copy and paste it into the appropriate Best Practices template (accept or reject) in the system. If formatting is important, you can upload your Development Letter into the comments at the appropriate location into the template after you have inserted the template. But realize that doing that makes it more difficult to convey your information to authors on mobile devices and other small screens.