Report of the Editor of The Journal of Finance for the Year 2005

I AM HAPPY TO REPORT that 2005 was another good year for The Journal of Finance. We received 1,377 submissions, of which 1,021 were new manuscripts. Both numbers again exceed the previous year’s totals. In 2005 the Journal published 86 articles, written by authors whose primary affiliations include 92 different institutions. Table I details the number and timing of submissions received throughout the year, and Table II details the editorial decisions made, by round, during 2005. The primary affiliations are summarized in Table III, which reports the number of authors per institution (where an article with n authors is counted as 1/n articles for each author’s institution). The institutions with the most JF authors last year were the University of Chicago (5 1/3) and the University of Pennsylvania (3 1/2). The Journal’s visibility and impact remain extremely high. As reported by Thomson’s ISI Web of Knowledge, the articles published in the Journal in 2002 and 2003 were cited 7,051 times during 2004, a total that ranks first among business and finance journals and fourth among all economics journals (behind the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Journal of Political Economy). That total implies an average of 3.1 citations per article, which again ranks first among business and finance journals and fourth among economics journals (behind the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Journal of Economic Geography). Turnaround time remains good, little changed from last year, with two thirds of the editorial decisions taking less than 60 days and fewer than 10% taking over 100 days. Table IV provides details on turnaround for the editorial decisions made during 2005. The backlog of unpublished accepted articles continues to run slightly longer than a year, and it contains only six more articles than it did 3 years ago. You might recall that, in 2004, we made the August issue full length, thus raising the Journal’s annual page budget by 120 pages, or about three or four typical articles. Thus, the net growth in the backlog over 3 years is effectively only about two or three articles. The average length of the review process, coupled with the publication backlog, produces a significant period during which the editor who handled an article is not necessarily the one whose name appears on the masthead when that article is published. Of the articles published in 2005, about two thirds were handled by Rick Green and one third by me. For 2006, about 85% of the articles appearing will be those I handled, and the rest will be the remaining balance of the papers Rick has handled. Given that the backlog and acceptance rates