The Editor's Department

The following is excerpted and adapted from the Editor’s Report that was submitted to the Executive Committee at its annual meeting in Washington in January 2001.

This past year was the sixth of my seven-year term as editor of Language. It was very similar to the previous year, fairly quiet and free of editorial, redactional, or technological change. I remarked in my last report that the overall shape of the journal and the mix of articles, book reviews, and book notices had stabilized at realistic proportions, and this year’s data largely bears out that statement. Table 1 provides the relevant figures for the seven years since 1994, the year before I became editor.

Table 1.

Pages and numbers of submissions published, 1994–2000.

• • This year, the number of pages was somewhat greater than the 900 that has been mandated historically by the society for many years. The increase was occasioned by a backlog of articles, several of which happened to be longer than usual. I fully expect that we will be able to move back closer to the lower number next year, but I believe that there are good reasons for aiming for a somewhat higher target in the future. The current acceptance rate, which has hovered between 15 and 20 percent for many years, is discouraging to even the best potential contributors. If we can increase the total pages gradually to close to 300 per issue, I believe that we will do a service to both the profession and to Language.

• • In 2000, a little more than 70 percent of the annual allotment of pages was devoted to articles and 25 percent to book reviews and book notices. This was somewhat greater than the 65/35 ratio that has become traditional, again largely because of the number of longer-than-usual articles, but we may want to retain the new ratio.

• • We published 34 full reviews and 207 notices in 2000. The number of notices was almost identical to the previous year, but the number of reviews was smaller, in large part because we received fewer reviews this year.

• • The lag time for book reviews and book notices has increased, so that the December issue contained reviews and notices that were received between January and March of the same year. The ideal lag is no more than nine months, which we expect to return to next year.

• • The number of articles published in the last year was 24, one more than the previous year. I had originally set a goal of 25 articles per year when I became editor. Given the pattern over the last two years, this goal seems to have been correct.

In last year’s report, I suggested that the executive committee should endorse the numbers that I reported as guidelines for future editors, not as a straitjacket, but rather as a way of making the editor’s job simpler and clearer. This year’s numbers are similar enough to last year’s that I feel that they add support to my earlier suggestion.

Technologically, 2000 was similar to 1999, with no innovations. We have continued to enjoy the benefits of our long-term relationship with both our typesetters (Maryland Composition) and our printers (Cadmus). For the near future, the Postscript typesetting environment seems to be reasonably stable. One aspect of our operation that surprises some is that we continue to submit copy to the typesetters on paper rather than electronically, and that the typesetters continue to key in the copy the old-fashioned way, even though almost every article submitted to Language is prepared electronically. There are two reasons for this practice. The first is that Language has always maintained a tradition of fairly heavy copy editing. By the time our copy editor is through with the average manuscript, the number of changes on any page is so substantial that the cost of revising the author’s electronic file is about the same as the cost of keying in the entire file. Note that typesetters’ pricing structure is not directly connected to the cost of production: typesetting from...