See also, Information for Authors
From, the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter
Vol, 13, No. 2
REPORT FROM THE HO EDITOR
By Donald D. Stull
<stull@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
University of Kansas
With Volume 60 (2001), I concluded my first three-year term as editor of Human Organization (HO). I am grateful to the Society for Applied Anthropology Board of Directors for giving me the opportunity to serve as editor and for renewing my appointment for a second (and final) three-year term. I would like to take this opportunity to summarize the 2001 annual report I delivered in Atlanta.
Volume 60 contained 30 articles, one special collection of 8 articles, 1 Malinowski Award Lecture, and 1 commentary, for a total of 40 pieces and 436 pages. Of the 147 authors who published in HO last year, 44 percent were male, 47 percent were female, and the gender of 9 percent is unknown.
During 2001, 89 new manuscripts were submitted to HO. Of these, 77 came from the United States and 12 from other countries. North Carolina (8, submissions) and California (6) led the United States in submissions; the United Kingdom (3) and Australia (2) led all other countries.
Last year is the second year in a row that new manuscript submissions have fallen: the 89 submissions in 2001 represents 21 fewer submissions than we received in 2000 and 44 fewer than in 1999. Submissions seem to be up in 2002, however. Of the manuscripts submitted in 2001, 27 percent were accepted, compared to 23 percent in 2000 and 37 percent in 1999.
Human Organization is a discerning journal; it is also a timely one. I am proud to report that the time it takes us to process a manuscript continues to fall. The elapsed time from receipt of a manuscript until a decision is made on it was only 72 days, down from 80 in 2000 and 89 in 1999. The longest it took to process a manuscript was 131 days.
Once we accept a manuscript, we want to bring it to our readership as quickly as we can. Two factors enter into this equation: the speed with which authors revise their manuscripts for publication and the time it takes us to bring revised manuscript to press. The interval between initial acceptance and the date the author returned the revised manuscript was 48 days in 2000, down from 91 days in 2000 (data are not available for 1999). The longest it took an author to revise a manuscript in 2000 was 138 days, down from 420 in the previous year.
Human Organization comes out every March, June, September, and December. Once we receive a revised manuscript, we move it into production as rapidly as possible. Last year, it took an average of 201 days from receipt of a revised manuscript until it was published. The range was from 99 to 654 days. In 2000, the average publishing time was 160 days, and the range was 50 to 375 days. How soon the revised manuscript goes to press depends in part on when in the publication cycle we receive it. It also depends on how publishable the revised version is. Manuscripts that fall on the “long end” of this timeline are ones that require additional substantive revisions or extensive copyediting because English is not the authors’ first language.
Taking into account all three variables in publication turnaround--manuscript processing time, author revising time, and publishing time--manuscripts we published in 2001 averaged 299 days from the day they first landed on our desk until they reached your mailbox. By the standards of scholarly publication that is PDQ.
Timely publication is only one criterion for a firstrate journal; another is quality. We believe HO is the premier international journal for applied social science. We hope you agree. If you do, please let us know, and if you don’t, well, let us know that as well. We want to hear from you on what we’re doing right and what needs improvement.
