Editorial Board Metrics: A Method for Assessing the Performance and Effectiveness of Editorial Board Members and Editors

 Editorial Board Metrics (EBM) is used to determine the performance, effectiveness, and role of editorial board members and journal editors in policymaking and designing a roadmap for the future of journals. This study analyzed and evaluated indexed journals in health sciences, biological sciences, arts, and humanities using EBM.

 Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used to visualize the interconnections of editorial board members and journals. For this purpose, centrality indices were used, including degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality. Data analysis was performed in two descriptive and inferential sections for editorial board members (2813 individuals) and journals (200 journals) using statistical methods such as frequency, percentage, mean, Kendall's Tau-b coefficient, Chi-square test, and software such as UCINET, SPSS, Net Draw, and Python.

 The research findings on the status of the impact factor of journals indicate that in the field of humanities and arts, the "Journal of Applied Issues in Islamic Education" with 1.095 has the highest impact factor. In the field of health sciences, "Iranian Journal of Ageing (Salmand)- Waiting List" with 0.446 has the highest impact factor, and in the field of biological sciences, "Plant Genetic Researches - Primary List" with 0.37 has the highest impact factor in each subject area. Some journals in the fields of humanities and arts have a high self-citation rate, including journals that have over 80% self-citation in the field of humanities and arts, such as "The Journal of Nahjolbalagheh" (77.80%) and "Journal of Kurdish Literature" and "Persian Language and Iranian Dialects" (100%). Ahad Faramarz Gharamaleki (Professor at the University of Tehran) and Mohammad Hassan Ghadrdan Gharamaleki (Professor at the Institute of Culture and Islamic Thought) have the highest level of interlocking (frequency 5). Of 368 individuals with co-authorship, 333 are male, and 35 are female. Regarding academic rank, the "Professor" with 71.76% and "the Associate Professor" with 15.48% have the highest share in the editorial board community.

 Of the 2,813 individuals who collaborated in 200 journals, 368 editorial board members had to interlock. The results indicate a significant negative relationship between the impact factor and the interlocking of the social science research journals and between the number of citations received by journals and their interlocking. Furthermore, there is a correlation between a rise in journal quartiles and a decrease in interlocking. According to the results, the number of journal quartiles is a significant negative predictor of interlocking. The Immediacy Index (II) of journals, the Median Impact Factor (MIF) in the macro subject, the number of articles, and the self-citation index are not significant predictors of interlocking. Considering the role of editorial board members in the development and quality improvement of journals through reviewing and selecting topics, the effort to form more diverse editorial boards with less interlocking will not only bring more diverse research output to the publishing world, deposit; which will create a positive competitive environment with a broader range of votes.