Here is a thread about publishing with @govandopp based on data we have collected over the past two years on (a) gender and (b) turnaround. I also want to highlight some features of our journal website that will help you place your research in a wider conversation. 1/n

The question about gender is important to us because we realize that there is an imbalance. Only about 24 percent of our submissions come from women. This is not low compared to other journals, but it is low relative to the percentage of Political Science PhDs who are women. 2/n

On the plus side, the quality of papers from women has been very high -- and papers either solely authored by women or lead authored by women constitute 32 percent of acceptances once the refereeing process is completed. We definitely want more of these submissions! 3/n

This brings me to turnaround. My editorial colleagues looked at the data for handling submissions and found that we are able to complete desk reviews within about 7-8 days. If your paper does not fit, we will let you know quickly. 4/n

As a reminder, @govandopp is an international journal of comparative politics. We try to cover all regions of the world. We also publish single-country cases. The one thing we require is that every paper speak to the larger conversations in comparative politics. 5/n

In practice, we tend to desk reject country cases that only tell us about what is happening inside the country and do not connect back to wider conversations. The reason is that our readers are unlikely to pay attention to those cases. We don't want your paper to get lost. 6/n

We allow submissions of up to 10k words for comparative papers and up to 8k words for single country cases. If you go beyond those limits, it will take us about a week to tell you to cut your paper down to size and resubmit. Then we will do the desk review. 7/n

If you make it through the preliminary review, we will line up three referees on a double-blind basis. If the first two reports come back strongly negative, we will give you a quick decision rather than making you wait for the third referee. This speeds up the review process. 8/n

On average we are able to complete the whole review process in about 70 days once we send it out to the referees. This average does not include the desk rejects. Our referee community is very conscientious and our managing editor is good at keeping the ball rolling. 9/n

Our managing editor is also very good at driving the production process. If your paper is accepted, we will move it through copyediting and into proofing relatively quickly. That said, we pay a lot of attention to this pre-production part. We want your work to look good. 10/n

As soon as we can sign off on the proofs, we will move your paper into our FirstView collection with a digital object identifier (DOI) that will remain the same once the paper is allocated to an issue of a volume. 11/n https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/firstview

Once your paper is online, we will start to promote it using social media. We will encourage you to promote it as well. And we have several different ways to get the word out. Which brings me to the wider conversation taking place in our journal. 12/n

The editorial team @govandopp has been going back through the journal to identify themese that have been important over the years. We then organize those themes into 'special collections'. 13/n https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/special-collections

These special collections serve two purposes. One is to organize promotional campaigns. We can make the articles in the collection 'free to view' and then help people connect what is happening in the world around us to both current and past research. 14/n

The collection we created on contentious politics and popular protest is a good illustration. Everyone can see that politics is changing as people struggle to address institutionalized discrimination. This collection helps put that in context. 15/n https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/information/contentious-politics-and-popular-protest

A second advantage of the special collections is to help prospective contributors identify where their research fits. Our collection on 'populism' is a one illustration. If you want to know what we have published on that issue, you can find it here. 16/n https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/information/populism-in-europe-a-government-and-opposition-collection

The most important part of the journal is the people. If you are thinking of contributing, you can reach out to the editorial team -- @neuropols @Adrian_Favero @anghel_veronica and me. We know most people can sort themselves out, but we are very happy to help if useful. 17/17