The Bishop Classification of Science Journal Editors

Deevy Bishop's story, "Science journal editors: a taxonomy" ( BishopBlog, Internet, Tues., 28th September 2010 ) includes the following wonderful diagram, and a detailed explanation of each clade in the tree.

This is a story about journal editors who receive manuscripts and then decide what to do with them.

My first thought is that the worst and best of journal editors share the same higher-order clade (see upper areas of the diagram) because there has been lineage sorting, with all the best traits going into one lineage, to give us the God and Talent Scout editors, and all the worst traits going into the other lineage.

Perhaps the more usual editors lie on the lower, separate clade. I guess a lot of good editors are also a little obsessive. They are not paragons of reason, but are not too obsessive either. So Paragon and Obsessive are close, but there must be lots of different kinds in there too, if we look for more examples.

(Tree by Deevy Bishop 2010 )