Special Issues and Guest Editing: Opportunity or Risk?

Special issues can spotlight a topic or become a route for weak oversight, so authors and invited guest editors need to know what healthy practice looks like.

Explainer · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

How a healthy special issue works

1. Topic approved by the journal
2. Public call for papers
3. Same peer-review standards as regular papers
4. Guest editor coordinates; staff/senior editor retains oversight
5. Conflicts are handed off

Topic approved by the journal. Before a call exists in public, someone proposed it and an editor accepted or refused it — normally a written proposal setting out the scope, why the topic is timely, and who would guest edit. From outside you see the result of that gate rather than the gate itself: the call sits on the journal’s own website, under its masthead and domain, alongside its other announcements. A collection that exists only as an email in your inbox, or only on a conference page, or only at an address no link from the journal reaches, has not visibly passed through anything.

Public call for papers. An open call names the guest editors and their affiliations, states the scope in terms of subject matter, gives a deadline, and routes submissions through the journal’s normal submission system. Private invitations are not the problem — soliciting good work is ordinary editing, and most healthy collections do some of it. The problem is a collection nobody outside one network could have discovered, because then the authors, the reviewers and the editor come from the same address book and the review is internal by construction.

Same peer-review standards as regular papers. The same system, a comparable number of reviewers, the same decision categories, and — the part that matters — a real possibility of rejection. There is a plain question you can put to a guest editor or an editorial office: have papers been rejected from this collection? A collection that accepts everything is not reviewing, whatever it calls the process. Watch the clock as well. Reviewers are busy people who have to read the paper, so genuine review takes weeks. Speed alone proves nothing on its own — a desk rejection can be same-day and a short paper can move quickly — but submitted, reviewed, revised and accepted inside a fortnight is a claim about human availability, not about your paper.

Guest editor coordinates; staff or senior editor retains oversight. The guest editor’s job is to find the papers, choose reviewers, read what comes back and recommend. The journal’s job is to decide. In practice that shows up as decision letters leaving the journal’s system rather than a personal mailbox, a handling editor of record who can be named, and a journal that is able to overturn a recommendation it does not like. Where a publisher hands a guest editor unilateral acceptance authority over a run of papers, most of the later problems in that collection trace back to that single arrangement.

Conflicts are handed off. A guest editor cannot handle their own submission, their students’ or supervisees’ submissions, papers from recent co-authors, or papers from their own department. Handing off means the whole file moves: another editor picks the reviewers, reads the reports and makes the call, and the conflicted person does not see the reviews or learn who wrote them. Recusal that amounts to a sentence in the acknowledgements while the same person still runs the file is not recusal. Whether guest editors should publish in their own collections at all is genuinely contested; the defensible version is a small number of papers, handled end to end by someone else, and said plainly in the paper.

Read: Special Issues and Guest Editors

Red flags for authors

• Guaranteed acceptance into the collection
• Review completed in days with no substance
• Guest editor inviting only their network with no independent oversight
• Pressure to cite the guest editor’s papers

Guaranteed acceptance. This is the one item on the list that settles the question by itself. Acceptance is a decision that cannot exist before review, so any wording promising it — every paper from the symposium will appear, acceptance assured for submissions received by the deadline — is describing something other than peer review. Softer phrasings do the same work: a high acceptance rate advertised as a feature, or an assurance that the collection will run to a set number of papers. If a call is ambiguous, ask the editorial contact in writing whether papers can be rejected from the collection, and keep the reply.

Review completed in days with no substance. A weightless review reads as three or four generic sentences, with no reference to a page or a line, no question about the method, and nothing in it you would have to change. What to do when you receive one is counterintuitive: write to the handling editor and ask for an additional review before the decision stands. Requesting more scrutiny of your own paper feels absurd, and it is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy, because a paper published with a visibly unreviewed history is a problem you carry for the rest of its life.

Only their own network. You can check this in a few minutes once papers start appearing. Compare the author lists in the published collection against the guest editors’ recent co-authors and institutions. One lab, its alumni and its two long-standing collaborators is not a themed collection; it is a group publishing itself with a cover page.

Pressure to cite the guest editor’s papers. Hold on to the distinction here, because guest editors are often genuine experts in the topic and their work may well belong in your references. A legitimate request names specific papers, gives a scientific reason, and leaves the decision to you. A coercive one asks for a quantity of citations, ties them to acceptance, or supplies a list with no argument about why any single item is relevant. Answer the legitimate version on the merits. For the coercive version, ask in writing for the reason each citation is needed, add only what genuinely belongs, and if the demand is repeated, raise it with the journal’s editor-in-chief or the publisher’s research-integrity contact rather than with the guest editor. Save the correspondence either way.

Before you submit to a special issue

Verify the journal before you look at the collection at all — a beautifully run special issue inside a journal you should not be publishing in is still a paper you should not publish there. Once the journal is clear, work through the collection:

1. The call for papers appears on the journal’s own domain, not only in an email or on a third-party page
2. Guest editors are named with affiliations and institutional email addresses, and their publication records match the topic
3. Submission runs through the journal’s normal system rather than to a personal mailbox
4. The scope statement describes a subject, not a quota or an offer
5. Someone at the journal is identifiable as editor of record for the collection
6. Fees are the journal’s usual fees, stated before submission rather than revealed after acceptance
7. The collection sits inside the journal’s normal issue structure and is archived the same way as everything else it publishes

If you are already in the process when something on that list fails, you can still withdraw. Withdrawal before acceptance is ordinary and costs nothing but time: send a short note to the editorial office stating that you are withdrawing the manuscript, ask for written confirmation, and sign no licence and pay nothing while you wait. It gets harder after acceptance and much harder after publication, so the moment you notice is the cheapest moment to act. If you have already published in a collection that is criticised later, your paper is still judged on its own merits — and the review correspondence you kept is what lets you show what actually happened to it.

Red flags for invited guest editors

• No training, no conflict policy, acceptance quotas
• Ability to handle your own papers without recusal
• Publisher indifference to reviewer identity verification

No training, no conflict policy, quotas. A serious invitation arrives with a named contact at the journal, written guidance on how decisions are made and recorded, a conflict-of-interest policy you can read before agreeing, and no target number of papers. The quota is the clearest of the three because it changes the job: an editor asked to produce fifteen papers by March is being asked to sell rather than to select. If a number is mentioned, ask what happens when only six good papers arrive. Then we publish six is the right answer, and the reaction you get tells you more than the wording of the invitation did.

You could handle your own papers. Test this before you accept, not after. Ask what the submission system does if you or a close collaborator submits to your own collection. If the answer is that you would simply handle it yourself, or that the journal would leave it to your judgement, the controls do not exist — not for you, and not for whoever edits the next collection.

Indifference to reviewer identity. Verification means the journal checks that a proposed reviewer is a real person working where the record says: institutional addresses rather than free webmail supplied by the author, a persistent identifier or a checkable institutional profile, and a refusal to send manuscripts to contact details nobody can confirm. This is the specific hole that manipulated peer review runs through. A publisher that lets you type in any name and any address will let everybody else do the same, and your name is on the collection where it happens.

Before you say yes, get answers to a short list: who at the journal is editor of record, whether you can reject papers outright, what the written conflict policy says, who verifies reviewers, and what happens to manuscripts still under review when the deadline passes. Ask as well whether any fee arrangement depends on how many papers are accepted. A discount that grows with volume is a conflict of interest pointed directly at your decisions.

It is worth being honest about the appeal. Guest editing is a service credit, a line on a CV and real standing in a field, and those are legitimate reasons to accept. What to weigh against them is that your name stays attached permanently. If a collection is questioned or unwound later, it is questioned under the names of the people who edited it, and the invitation email that persuaded you will not be part of the public record.

Bottom line

Treat special-issue papers like any other submission: verify the journal first (predatory checklist), then verify the collection’s editorial oversight.

The order is deliberate. Oversight questions only mean something once you know the journal is real, and an impressive-looking collection is among the easiest things in publishing to fake. Journal check first, oversight check second, and write down what you found before you submit — so that if anyone asks later, you can say exactly what you checked and when.

Directive Academy · Journals