Report of the Editor of The Journal of Finance for the Year 2012

I AM HAPPY TO report that 2012 was another good year for the Journal of Finance. We received 1,276 submissions, of which 1,147 were new manuscripts. The number of new submissions was virtually unchanged from 2011. There were 129 resubmissions, slightly below the 138 in 2011. Note that the Journal of Finance no longer counts “style” revisions in the official revision count, which explains the sharp drop in resubmissions after 2008. In 2012, the Journal published 60 articles, written by authors whose primary affiliations include 73 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 the University of Chicago, Oxford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. The Journal’s visibility and impact remain extremely high. As shown in Table III, articles published in the Journal were cited 18,293 times in all journals during 2011, a total that ranks first among business and finance journals and third among all economics journals (behind the American Economic Review and Econometrica). Our one-year impact factor (cites during 2011 to articles published in 2009 and 2010, divided by the total number of articles published in those two years) is 4.22 (up from 3.76 in 2009), which ranks second among business and finance journals and fourth among all economics journals (up from seventh in 2009). The five-year impact factor is 6.33 and ranks third among all economics journals (behind the Journal of Economic Literature and the Quarterly Journal of Economics). Turnaround time remains good, with 68.4% of the editorial decisions taking less than 70 days and 19.3% taking over 100 days. The latter is higher than last year’s 16.9% and the expectation is that this increase is temporary. Table IV provides details on turnaround for the editorial decisions made during 2012. Figure 1 compares turnaround over the 2008 to 2012 period. The median turnaround time increased in 2012 to 47 days from 42 days in 2011. Again, note that 2009 is the first year that quick style revisions were omitted from the calculation. As such, the years 2009 to 2012 are not comparable to the earlier data.