Editorial challenges in a small scientific community: Study of Croatian editors

Abstract

This article presents results from a study of 74 Social Science Croatian journal editors that asked about challenges encountered during their work, with a special focus on peer review processes. The study used an online questionnaire with 19 questions. The findings confirmed many logistics challenges and peer review-related problems associated mostly with substandard work of the reviewers; author misconduct, especially plagiarism; and multiple submission of articles. The findings show similar problems to other regions of the world, and some problems discovered in this study demonstrate unique problems encountered within a small research community. The discovered problems call for changes and new editorial procedures.