Editors' Introduction

As we announced one year ago in issue 56.2, we have started to report the journal’s acceptance rate annually in every spring issue. The Transportation Journal has been published since 1961, establishing it as one of the oldest academic journals in the field. After fifty-seven years of quarterly publication, the research journal continues to be both rigorous and relevant. The number of manuscripts submitted year-after-year continues to increase and we are appreciative of the reviewers who serve to ensure that only the highest quality original research is ultimately accepted for publication. Our method of calculating the acceptance rate is straightforward; we simply divide the total number of articles published in the year (2017) by the total number of papers submitted during the year (2017). Submissions of revisions are not counted as separate submissions to produce conservative acceptance rates. Using this method, the acceptance rate of research papers for 2017 was computed as 13.6%, or equivalently, a rejection rate of 86.4%. In 2016 the acceptance rate was 13.2%, so the journal acceptance rate has remained relatively stable over the last two years. We understand that this may not be the most accurate way of calculating the acceptance rate, as this does not reflect the proportion of papers submitted in 2017 that survived the series of reviews to acceptance. However, this allows us to compute the acceptance rate relatively easily, and we believe that, in the long run, this rate will reflect the correct acceptance rate.

Respectively,
Yoshi Suzuki and Mary Holcomb,
Co-Editors