Editor's Note

Excerpt

New editors quickly learn the “dirty little secret” of the peer review process. Reviewer consensus is less common than authors generally assume or editors hope for. Even experienced and accomplished scholars frequently disagree in their evaluations of manuscripts and their recommendations regarding publication. This disagreement is often due to the reviewers focusing on different aspects of a study—for example, the importance of the research question, the nature of the data, the execution of the analytic strategy, the quality of the exposition, or the significance of the findings. The paper by Amuedo-Dorantes and colleagues provides a good example. Throughout the review process for their paper, I received substantially divergent feedback and advice from a very well-respected and trusted panel of referees. Because of the timeliness of the topic, the novelty of the data set, and the provocative nature of some of the findings, I decided that this was a case in which the voices of the authors and the reviewers deserved to be heard by the readers of Demography. Therefore, I invited the exchange that follows. The article by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Thitima Puttitanun, and Ana Martinez-Donate is followed by commentary from Doug Massey, Cecilia Menjivar, and Pia Orrenius. Enjoy! …