The Editor's Department: Endgame: The Final Stages of the Review Process and Some Reflections at Year's End

This issue marks the end of my first year as editor. Needless to say, though I say it nonetheless, I have learned much over these months. Naturally, I hope that I have been able to keep Language on the excellent course it has been on for seventy-eight years, but I leave that for others to decide. Instead, in this piece, I want to complete the trilogy—begun in Language 78.2 (‘A first take on the editorial and production process’) and continued in 78.3 (‘More on the editorial and production process’)—on the nuts and bolts of editorial decision-making, and then to offer some reflections ranging over a few events of the past year.

I left off last time with the promise of some discussion of the different types of decisions authors might receive on a submitted paper at the end of the review process. The three possible outcomes are for the paper to be accepted outright (though possibly with relatively minor changes), for it to be rejected outright, and for it to be rejected in its submitted form but with an invitation to the author to revise and resubmit.

An important preface to this discussion is the fact that of the roughly one hundred papers that are submitted or resubmitted to the journal in a year (figures on submissions can be found in the Editor’s Report published each year; see, for instance, Mark Aronoff’s report in Language 78.2.394–97), only about fifteen to twenty are accepted for publication (I defer a discussion of acceptance rates to a later column). Clearly, among the eighty or so that are not accepted, there will be a significant number of papers that have real interest for some linguists; therefore, the criteria by which papers are ultimately accepted or not need to be as explicit as possible, out of fairness to everyone involved. This task proves to be trickier than it might seem, but I give here an account of what goes into my decisions.

In reaching my final decision, I evaluate a paper on four key elements: scholarship, presentation, newsworthiness, and general interest. The ideal paper will embody the best in each of these areas. The scholarship must be impeccable: the data cited must be accurate, the relevant literature must be covered appropriately, the interpretations given must not contain glaring or irreparable errors, the right statistical tests must have been performed (and performed accurately), the experimental design must not be flawed, and so on. The presentation must be clear: the ideas must flow in a natural and logical way from one to the next, the links between ideas must be explicit, the arguments must all go through, tables and displays must accomplish what they are intended to, an appropriate amount of space must be spent on each point, technical terminology must be explained, and the writing must be crisp and clear. The point of the paper itself must be newsworthy: the paper must present some novel set of facts or an original interpretation or creative synthesis of already known facts. The discovery in question need not be earth-shattering—our science, like most, generally grows by small steps—but it must be significant in some sense, and it must not simply restate material and views that are already known, agreed upon, or rejected by the linguistic community at large. If the paper speaks to an existing controversy, its contribution to resolving that controversy should be made evident. Note that nowhere have I said that a particular theory needs to be advocated or adhered to. As my predecessors have often emphasized in these pages and I have echoed in my previous columns, Language is in principle open to linguists of all theoretical persuasions. Simply advocating a particular theory does not guarantee an entry into the pages of the journal, nor is it a cause for exclusion; conversely, advocating or debunking a particular theory or claim does not merit acceptance or rejection in and of itself. Rather, at all times, it is what the authors make of...