Dear MSR Executive Committee and Members:
Greetings on this lovely Saturday from Frederiksberg, Denmark. As the 2018 Scholarly Program chair, I can report that we're past the third round of Program Guide proofing checks, with the session chairs notified. Various award notifications are also getting out. To start this summary report, let me first write of my thanks to Stacie Chappell for her PDW chair work and careful edit on the second round of Guide proofs. The uniformity in paper title capitalizations are all her careful notice, with my (lesser) service input of her work to the "Program Developer," which I have come to believe is a form of AOM artificial intelligence (AI) that I've served these months.
In this email, I thought to let everyone know a little about the scope of MSR operations, which got us to this point. As the chair, my role is largely that of a willing witness to a bewildering amount of careful, chronologically sequenced activity that takes place the world over. It is all then channeled into the AOM "Program Developer," which is not person, but keeps all of us on track, in time, and in proper sequence. Of course, this bit of AI kit has its way with us only because the AOM headquarters staff makes these things happen. So, good on them.
Here is what Stacie and I saw after the AOM filing deadline - the submissions distribution:
Finalized MSR Submissions (By Type) | 74 - Paper 17 - PDW Workshop 14 - Symposium |
Of course, the simple number of papers submitted masks how many people were involved, the world over, in getting these offerings in to the online submission, and to do on time. A little Excel work gets us to know that 174 individuals helped author those Scholarly papers, admitting of same author multiple offerings. Still, that is pretty impressive.
Once the submissions were in, MSR had 160 individuals who signed up to review. While we did not use all of these, that simple act of signing up and indicating a willingness is, and remains, very important for Interest Group statistics.
I reached out to 132 reviewers who looked at an average of 2.3 scholarly papers. We had, in total, 257 scholarly review assignments, and 46 review assignments for the 14 Symposium submissions. The reviewers hit an 86% completion rate by deadline. From the authors perspective, papers averaged 3.48 reviews. Different chairs have different views about the optimum number of reviewers. I sought to get at least three reviews for every paper or Symposium submission, with the prospect of an Associate Editor review if there was variance in reviewer response either in the quantitative metrics or the qualitative content.
We seemed low in listed Associate Editors when the time approached to deploy these - but I had not solicited in advance as it seemed premature to evident need. I was very impressed and grateful at the speed of response to my post - there were more than 30 responses from the world over within about three days, all from individuals with plenty to do, but willing to do yet more. Again, I did not need to use each volunteer, but these statistics do tend to stick around and empirically verify our Interest Group identity and strength.
As you will soon see when the Program Guide is available, we have eight accepted Symposiums, four with MSR as lead sponsor, the others sponsored by OB or OMT. There were 33 Scholarly or Discussion papers accepted.
Together with Stacie, we tried to schedule the MSR events sequentially, reducing the number of MSR sessions occurring at the same time. We took this approach out of memory from prior years, when MSR members lamented having to opt out of sessions due to double-bookings. Some overlap could not be avoided, but we definitely reduced the number of double-time MSR sessions from the first bookings. We know that some of the rooms are going to be pretty cozy in consequence, but cozy is all the rage these days.
I think this covers the mains points of process to date that I thought interesting to share. Over the coming days, I'll be posting about the MSR Plenary and the MSR & Friends sessions. We'll be inviting you to join us for both, of course. But we'll also invite you to participate by crafting your own Profile, which can then be uploaded to the new AOM Connections MSR site. And then there is the topic of regional representatives, with a view to grow our membership into a global networked MSR organization. But those are only hints, as this email is long enough.
Thanks to the Executive Committee for great support throughout,
Charlie Tackney