Report of the Editor of The Journal of Finance for the Year 2009

I AM HAPPY TO REPORT that 2009 was another good year for the Journal of Finance. We received 1,158 submissions, of which 1,020 were new manuscripts. The number of new submissions is identical to the total in 2008. Resubmissions appear to be down but this is a result of the Journal of Finance no longer counting “style” revisions in the official revision count. There were 100 style revisions in 2009. Hence, the comparable paper flow is 1,258 total submissions in 2009 compared to 1,191 in 2008. In 2009, the Journal published 78 articles, written by authors whose primary affiliations include 92 different institutions. Table I details the number and timing of submissions received throughout the year. The primary affiliations are summarized in Table II, 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 Journal authors last year were Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, New York University, and the University of Chicago. The Journal’s visibility and impact remain extremely high. The articles published in the Journal in 2006 and 2007 were cited 14,679 times during 2008, a total that ranks first among business and finance journals and third among all economics journals (behind the American Economic Review and Econometrica). Our impact factor (cites during 2008 to articles published in 2006 and 2007, divided by the total number of articles published in those two years) is 4.018, which ranks first among business and finance journals and third among all economics journals (behind the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Literature). Turnaround time remains good, with almost 70% of the editorial decisions taking less than 70 days and only 18% taking over 100 days. Table IV provides details on turnaround for the editorial decisions made during 2009. Figure 1 compares turnaround for 2007, 2008, and 2009. The median turnaround time appears to increase from 39 days to 45 days. However, as mentioned earlier, 2009 is the first year where style rounds have been purged from the reporting process. Given that these style rounds often have very quick turnaround, 45 days is more representative of the median turnaround in 2008 and 2007. Let me comment on the 18% of papers that take more than 100 days. First, most of these papers are in the 100to 120-day range. For example, as of December 31, 2009, there was no paper currently in process more than