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Not sure whether this is common practice, but in the journal to which I am submitting a manuscript (JMEMS), I have to choose an editor. I am not 100% sure whether this is a mandatory requirement, but it seems like there are over 40 editors.

I know some of the editors have good relationships with my advisor. For this paper, I am solely responsible for publishing the paper. My advisor is not helping me much, and I have not directly submitted paper before.

The journal also doesn't mention who is in charge of what research areas. I can possibly guess, but I will have to do a lot of legwork to figure out the best match.

How critical is choosing the correct editor? Is it best to choose editors who know my advisor?

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The editor is the person responsible for directing your paper to a competent reviewer. Taking that into account, I'd strongly suggest you choose the editor that is most related to your research area, because he will have more contacts of experts in that field. Your advisor's knowledge on some editors can probably help you discover which ones hold this position, but you really should have this information on all of them. E-mail the journal and ask for this information before you do the legwork.

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  • I did contact the chief editor half an hour back. He replied that he will chose the editors based on my recommendation or based on his own evaluation. So right now I am just going through the list of editors, quickly looking through their publications to estimate their fields and will choose a few based on their research area. Hopefully the chief editor will reroute the paper in case my choice is not the best.
    – alpha_989
    Nov 7, 2016 at 17:37
  • I see. Another thing you can try is, instead of browsing their publications and estimating their fields, you can check their Google Scholar's profile and the registered fields of interest. Assuming they are active in the academic community (and therefore have their profiles filled), through this process you will only need to find one article to get to the author's page instead of browsing various articles and determining such fields yourself.
    – Eric Lino
    Nov 23, 2016 at 18:04

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