The Editor's Department

THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT The following is an excerpt from the Editor's report that was presented to the Executive Cornmittee at its annual meeting in New York in January 1998. In this year's report, I will focus on technical matters, because that is where most of the changes occurred at the journal in 1997. I will deal with these matters chronologically. The first technical change, which was instituted in the March issue, and which no one has yet commented on, was a shift in the type size for reviews to 9/11. The type size for reviews is now intermediate between that for book notices, 8/10, and that for articles, which remains at 10/12. The type sizes now reflect what I believe to be the prominence of each of these sections and the reduction in size saves space without impairing readability much at all, especially in the light of subsequent changes. The next matter is the shift to a Postscript typesetting environment, which was made in the December issue. The reasons for this change were outlined in the December Editor's Department, and the most important of these have now borne fruit: readers who compare the two issues set in Postscript with previous ones will agree, I think, that the printed volume looks better and that the tighter set does not sacrifice readability, but instead improves it. Furthermore, the goal of offering Language in an electronic format, which Postscript makes possible, will soon be realized. The Executive Committee has now given me permission to make each year's volume available to members on CD-ROM, along with a search engine, in both Windows 95 and Mac OS formats. Institutional subscribers will automatically receive the CD version of the journal annually , in addition to the quarterly paper version. Institutional subscriptions will be raised by ten dollars to cover the cost of the CD. Individual members may order the CD annually along with their membership dues, also at a cost of ten dollars. The 1998 volume will be available on CD-ROM early in 1999 to those who order it when paying their 1999 membership dues. Paper remains our largest single expense. As we started setting pages for the December issue, I began to think about other ways to add content without adding pages. After consulting with the typesetters, who agreed that there would be no technical or esthetic problem, I decided to increase the page length beginning with the December 1997 issue from 46 fines to 49 lines, which has increased the content of each page by about 6.5 percent. I welcome comments on the new page length and any other aspects of the changes in composition. I now turn to the statistical side of my report. One of my original goals as editor was to publish more, shorter, articles. Between 1996 and 1997, the average length of articles did decrease from 30 to 21 pages, but the number of articles unfortunately increased by very little, because we devoted fewer pages to articles. In 1996, we published 19 articles (15 full articles, 2 review articles, and 2 descriptive reports). In 1997, we published 23 articles (15 full articles, 4 discussion notes, and 4 review articles). The number of pages devoted to articles, however, dropped from 572 to 487 between 1996 and 1997, largely because of the pressure to publish book reviews and book notices. If we had more space for articles, then we could publish more of them. I hope that the additional space resulting from the changes in composition will allow us to do so, but the pressure from a recurring backlog ofbook reviews and book notices remains. I have used various means to alleviate this problem. At the beginning of the year, I decreased the type size for reviews, as I noted above. I also increased the number of reviews and notices published in 1997: while 48 book reviews and 130 book notices 464 THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT465 appeared in 1996, we published 65 book reviews and 185 book notices in 1997, an increase of 16 reviews and 55 notices. We also devoted 102 more pages to reviews and notices in 1997 (403 compared...