The Managing Editor’s Report for 2019/20 is available here. Some highlights include:
- The impact factor rose by 48% to 2.885. This rise is partly due to the number of zero-cited articles falling by 35%, and partly due to the publication of some high impact papers. The most cited was “Corporate Governance and Blockchains” (Yermack) on FinTech, consistent with the RF’s openness to new areas of research, and the second was “What Are the Best Liquidity Proxies for Global Research?” (Fong, Holden, and Trzcinka), consistent with the RF’s openness to papers using non-US data.
- The acceptance rate is 4.7%, compared to 5.3% in 2018-9 and 5.6% in 2017-8. The fast-track acceptance rate was 4.1%
- The number of submissions rose from 704 to 745, but the number of desk rejections fell from to 165 (from 182 in 2018-9, 236 in 2017-8 and 296 in 2016-7), potentially consistent with a higher quality of submissions. The number of R&Rs issued rose from 43 to 62
- The median turnaround time fell from 36 to 33 days
- One movement in the wrong direction was that the mean number of revisions before acceptance or conditional acceptance drifted from 1.2 to 1.3. Many of these cases were due to speculative revisions given to “diamonds in the rough” which eventually needed more than one revision to be accepted. Nevertheless, we will work hard to reduce this next year, given our aspiration to accept papers after one revision