See also, Information for Authors
From, the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter
Vol, 12, No. 2
REPORT FROM THE HO EDITOR
By Donald D. Stull
<stull@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
University of Kansas
By now you should have received the Spring 2001 issue. It arrived about a month later than normal because the printer encountered difficulty in obtaining cover stock. (Wouldn’t you know this would happen after I bragged in the last Newsletter about how the HO train always runs on time. Pride does indeed goeth before a fall.) For those of you who were unable to attend the SfAA Business Meeting in Merida, or were otherwise engaged, I would like to summarize my annual report. If anyone would like a copy of the full report (prepared by Kristin Lundberg, Laura Kriegstrom, Li Jian, and George Gotto), I’ll be happy to send you one.
Volume 59 of Human Organization contained 33 articles,1 special collection consisting of 7 articles, 1 Malinowski Award Lecture, 2 columns, and 3 commentaries, for a total of 478 pages. During the year 2000 we received 107 new manuscripts. This number was actually down 15 percent (16 manuscripts) from 1999. We don’t really know why, and we certainly hope it is not a sign of things to come. We don’t think so, since new submissions have kept us quite busy recently. We know it is not a sign of failing interest in the society or the journal—SfAA membership and subscriptions have both risen over the past two years.
The demography of submissions was largely unchanged from 1999. Slightly more than half of authors who submitted manuscripts last year were men (52%) and three-fourths came from the United States. The 80 manuscripts received from the United States came from 30 states (9 from New York, 7 from California, and 6 from Florida). The 27 inter-national submissions came from 15 countries (7 from Canada, 3 from Australia, and 2 each from Israel, Kenya, Mexico, and the Netherlands).
Of the manuscripts received in 2000, 42 percent were accepted and 57 percent were rejected; only one manuscript was still under review in late March, when we compiled our annual report. While the acceptance rate was somewhat higher in 2000 than in 1999, HO remains a very discerning journal. Furthermore, we continue to maintain an exceptional record of prompt processing and publication. We cut the number of days it took to make a decision on the average manuscript from 89 days in 1999 to 77 in 2000. During this time manuscripts are logged in and assigned a number, reviewers are selected, copies of the manuscript are mailed to reviewers, evaluations are received, and a final editorial decision on whether to accept or reject the submission is completed. In fact, it took us significantly less time to complete our evaluation than it did for authors to revise accepted manuscripts, which averaged 94 days. Once we received an acceptable revised manuscript, we were able to publish it within one or two issues (an average of 160 days). The time from initial receipt to publication averaged 252
days.
I believe the staff at Human Organization did an outstanding job in 2000, and we will continue to do our best to maintain HO’s tradition of excellence and timely publication. We hope you found much to interest and enlighten you in HO this past year, and we promise you there is more where that came from.
