From the Editor

With this issue of JSYS, Valerie Hansen is stepping down from her position as book review editor. For the past five years she has done a remarkable job soliciting substantive reviews of work in the field. We owe her a great debt of gratitude, particularly for enhancing the international dimensions of the Journal by her selection of reviewers. I am pleased to announce that Hilde de Weerdt has agreed to take over the position of book review editor, beginning with the next issue.

The next issue will also mark a significant milestone for the Journal. With #39 (2009), JSYS will join Project Muse and be available electronically when it is published. We will continue to post back issues on the website as soon as they are digitized, but participation in Project Muse will enable us to reach a larger audience, making research published in the Journal more readily available and thus used and cited more widely. The latter is relevant to an application we have submitted for the Journal to be included in the ISI Web of Knowledge database. Inclusion in this database is an important marker of a journal's standing in the scholarly community, and provides advantages especially for younger scholars whose publication records are often evaluated by whether or not journals are indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge.

Articles in the current issue cover a wide range of subjects—cosmology and politics, the Great Wall, and maritime trade—all focused on the Northern Song. Research reports include a posthumous paper on Song military history and a conference report on the China Biographical Database, with abstracts of the conference papers that are available online at the website (www.songyuan.org). Valerie Hansen's excellent work as book review editor is [Begin Page v] apparent in the five reviews. As before, we thank Professor Hirata Shigeki for providing the current bibliography of Song studies in Japan, and for soliciting the review of Song urban history research by Japanese scholars.

August, 2008 [Begin Page vi]