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  • Editor's Foreword:The State of LARR

Following the precedent set by previous editors of Latin American Research Review, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you a bit of information regarding the kinds of submissions we receive and how they are dealt with through the review process. To begin, on a twelve-month basis, May 1, 2008–April 30, 2009,1LARR received a record 120 manuscripts. This compares with previous twelve-month periods that never exceeded 110 manuscripts and continues the gradual increase in submissions that began during the editorship of my immediate predecessor, Peter Ward at the University of Texas at Austin. At the same time, we have maintained our high rate of rejection on internal review (57 percent, see table 1). Moreover, of the manuscripts sent out for external review, the majority of decisions received to date were "revise and resubmit," with only three manuscripts actually being accepted without even minor revisions (see table 2).

To better understand what this all means in more concrete terms, particularly in comparison with other academic journals, table 3 presents statistics on acceptance and rejection rates following the format that most major academic journals use. Among other things, this approach provides statistics based on manuscripts for which final editorial decisions have actually been taken, excluding manuscripts still under either internal review or external review. On that basis, LARR's overall acceptance rate is just 3 percent, or 11 percent if manuscripts accepted with only minor revisions are included.2 This underscores how LARR remains the preeminent journal in the field, and these are the statistics that we will provide authors when requested for tenure files, impact reports, and so on.

During the same twelve-month period, we received manuscripts from seventeen countries (table 4). The proportion of manuscripts from the United States has continued to show a gradual decline over recent years, with 49 percent coming from the United States during the twelve-month period ending April 30, 2009, compared to 59 percent in 2007. Brazil is again the second-largest source of manuscripts (12.50 percent, up slightly from 11.24 percent received in a similar period in 2008). Argentina, Chile, [End Page 3] and Mexico continue to be the principal sources of submissions after the United States and Brazil.


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Table 1.

Submissions May 1, 2008, to April 30 2009: 120


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Table 2.

Sent to External Review: 41


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Table 3.

Manuscripts Considered (May 1, 2008–April 30, 2009)

It is also interesting to get a sense of the various disciplines represented in manuscript submissions (see table 5). Because we do not ask authors to identify their discipline for logistical reasons (not to mention the fact that self-identifications of this nature are themselves notoriously subjective), identifying an author's discipline is not as straightforward a task as one might presume. In the end, we decided to identify the authors' disciplines according to the department or academic unit with which they are affiliated. While not perfect, this does allow us to identify some clear trends that are worth highlighting. First, political science continues to be the dominant discipline in terms of submissions to LARR, accounting for slightly more than one-third of the submissions in recent years. Literature is now the third principal source of submissions at 14.17 percent, just behind sociology at 15 percent but ahead of economics (11.67 percent). This [End Page 4]


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Table 4.

Author's Country of Origin


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Table 5.

Author's Discipline

[End Page 5]

suggests that LARR continues to reflect a good balance between the social sciences and humanities. For example, when literature is combined with submissions from cultural studies (2.5 percent), anthropology (5 percent), history (5.83 percent), and Spanish language (0.87 percent), the total submissions from the humanities total 28.33 percent, which does not seem to be excessively out of sync with what we know about the Latin American Studies Association's membership base.

Finally, it is worth noting...

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