Like a player-manager in baseball the chief editor must function both as a contributing member of the team and as its coach selecting, encouraging, cajoling and, where necessary, disciplining the other members to ensure that they give of their best. I believe the editor should do more than this. Even though an editor has little influence on the profitability of the product, the scientific quality of the final product must always be kept in mind, and the aim should be to achieve a quality product with as little need for revision as possible. The editor cannot direct the author s content but has to follow the mainstream of the most acceptable opinions for that particular journal and advise the author on conformity of style. There will always be worries about false findings getting published, while at the same time real science must not be rejected.
Few people like to work as editors, because it means heavy mental work with few rewards.
Furthermore, the full application of computerized publishing and computer-aided editing makes things much easier and more efficient for the editor and make editing more like electronic communication. More and more editors are developing IT techniques or information management practice rather than traditional editing techniques. But I feel what an editor does cannot just be described as information management. Simply providing a service for collecting or compiling information is not editing. A true editor concentrates on selecting the right information, enhancing its quality, and making the original information more perceptive, more logical, more reasonable, more complete, and more useful The editor often adds extra value after a lot of mental work on the original information, which is also sometimes recognized as a creative contribution to the science.