Behind the scenes: QA processes for the World Migration Report

The International Organization for Migration’s flagship publication, the World Migration Report, is produced to very high-quality standards to ensure that it is rigorous and that it provides readers with information and analysis on migration that is balanced, relevant and timely. This is done through several quality assurance mechanisms:

Co-editing, co-authoring and peer review

• The World Migration Report is co-edited and co-authored with some of the leading academic and applied researchers in the world.
• All thematic chapters are peer-reviewed by IOM specialists as well as leading academic experts.
• Geographic diversity of authorship, sources, academic peer reviewers and IOM expert reviewers is a priority to ensure that the report is truly is a world migration report. Gender balance is also a priority across all aspects of the report’s production.

IOM research team

• The Migration Research and Publications Division (MPRD), which produces the World Migration Report, has a small team of highly skilled and experienced researchers and consultants who work on the report. While the team is small, it highly diverse, with members hailing from all 6 UN regions.

Author workshop

• Prior to drafting, an author workshop is held to outline and discuss a range of quality assurance measures, including: IOM style rules, the target audiences, writing for accessibility (e.g. jargon-free language), peer review, data checking, chapter/report content, among other aspects.
• Thematic chapters that are not of sufficient quality are rejected by the IOM Editor, with due regard to feedback from the academic co-editor and IOM/academic peer reviewers.

Referencing, data checking and copy-editing

• The World Migration Report follows strict protocol referencing, including checking all statistics, ensuring sources are reputable and using primary sources, rather than secondary sources wherever possible.
• Data is verified to the extent possible through data-checking, and all content is copy-edited prior to finalization.

Report readability and usability

• To ensure that the World Migration Report is engaging and readable, efforts are made to include infographics that bring the data to life as well as graphs that illustrate relationships and trends in data. The IOM Research team also works very closely with some of the leading external migration data specialists who produce some of the graphs included in the report, as well as the interactive platform.
• The report’s contents and analysis draw on a large body of work – both grey and white literature, including from the scientific community, think tanks, NGOs, governments, among others – and tries to make sense of both the latest data as well as new and emerging migration issues.

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