The Editor's Department: Annual Report

Each year, at the time of the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January, the editor is asked to submit to the LSA Executive Committee a report on activities and issues pertaining to the running of the journal, to highlight new developments of note, and to address any matters deemed important by either the Executive Committee or the editor himself. Printed below, and taking the place of my more usual editorial comments in this section of the journal, is my second ‘State of the Journal’ report, summing up the events of my second year on the job. It is given here in essentially the form in which it was submitted to the Executive Committee in January, though with some informational updates indicated in footnotes, some errors corrected, some embellishments and elaborations added, and some minor editorial and typographical adjustments made as needed.

The Editor’s Report

After the excitement of my first year in the editorship of Language in 2002, I worried that the second year might be something of a letdown; the truth, though, is that it has been anything but that. In a sense, the year was a bit tamer, in that I faced far fewer novel crises and far fewer instances where I felt I was going out on a limb with a particular decision. For the most part, it was a year of settling into routines, of feeling more comfortable in these routines, of maintaining successful policies and procedures from the previous year, and of trying to improve upon those aspects of running the journal that did not work previously as they should have. All in all, the past twelve months proved to be interesting and exciting in their own right, even without the sense of newness that our operation had had the year before.

As is the norm for Language, four issues appeared, the last two (September and December) appearing on time, after some unfortunate but unavoidable events delayed the publication of the March and June issues. We have settled into a cycle of beginning production (via the copyediting process) four months in advance of the target date for mailing an issue instead of the three-month ‘window’ we worked with last year, and this move, coupled with a flow of papers that has allowed for the development of a set of accepted papers destined for the June 2004 issue even as we are still working on preparing the March issue (so that additional acceptances in the next few months will be aimed at the September issue, and so on), promises to keep the journal on time for the years to come.¹

These four issues contained 869 pages, with 540 devoted to 16 articles, 17 to 1 review article, 40 to 4 discussion notes, 42 to 4 obituaries, 51 to 18 book reviews (BRs), 123 to 163 book notices (BNs), and 56 to other sorts of material (letters: 1 page; Editor’s Department columns: 16 pages for 4 pieces, including the annual Editor’s Report; Recent Publications lists: 18 pages; index: 20 pages; slippage: 1 page). This compares favorably with the previous year overall, especially with regard to articles in both number and length—the average length of an article this past year was 33.75 pages, almost exactly the same as last year’s length (34 pages) but far greater than was the case in the 1960s and into the 1970s. As noted last year, these totals are comparable to those of the past 8 years (see Mark Aronoff’s Editor’s Report in Language 78.2.394–97 (2002)), though a bit on the low side, where the average issue contained 20 articles that took up 564 pages on average and the average number of pages was 48 for BRs and 178 for BNs; as before, it is not clear to me that the newly emerging norm for article length is a negative, and in any case, it is certainly true that not very many of the papers that are submitted these days are under 25 pages in length in manuscript form; in fact, most are in...