Report of the Editor of the Journal of Finance for the Year 2017

• Author: STEFAN NAGEL
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12708

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE •VOL. LXXIII, NO. 4 •AUGUST 2018

Report of the Editor of the Journal of Finance for

the Year 2017

STEFAN NAGEL, EDITOR

At the end of 2017, our team of editors completed its first full year at the helm

of the Journal of Finance. Even so, many of the numbers and successes that I

highlight in this report reflect the excellent work of our predecessors. For exam-

ple, virtually all papers published in the Journal in 2017 were handled by the

previous editorial team headed by Ken Singleton. The majority of submissions

accepted for publication in 2017 were accepted by Ken’s team. And many of

the articles that contribute to the most recent available impact factors for 2016

include the impact of papers initially submitted prior to 2013 and accepted by

Campbell Harvey.

I am pleased to report that 2017 was a good year for the Journal. Table I

details the number and timing of submissions received throughout the year.

We received 1,166 submissions, of which 1,030 were new manuscripts and

136 were resubmissions. The number of new submissions fell slightly com-

pared with 2016, when it was 1,081. Two policy changes that we implemented

recently contributed to this decline. First, for reasons that I explained in my

report last year, we discontinued the use of “reject-and-resubmit” editorial deci-

sions beginning in July 2016. One of the (intended) consequences of this change

is a greater degree of transparency in the editorial statistics—for example, by

eliminating the double counting of reject-and-resubmits as new submissions

(once on the initial submission, and once when the “rejected” paper is resub-

mitted as a “new” submission). Prior to this policy change in 2016, about 60

“new” submissions per year were actually reject-and-resubmits. This number

decreased to 12 in 2017 and is expected to fall to zero soon since we have not is-

sued a reject-and-resubmit since July 2016. The second change that materially

affected new submission numbers is an update to the Journal’s submission fee

schedule in March 2017 that led to a reclassification of several countries from

low- to middle-income status, eliminating their eligibility for free submission.

This change reduced the number of submissions from the affected countries

from around 60 per year to close to zero.

Turnaround remains good with little change from previous years. As can be

seen in Table II, in 2017, 70% of editorial decisions took less than 70 days

and only 11.3% took over 100 days. The median turnaround time in 2017 was

45 days. Figure 1compares turnaround over the 2013 to 2017 period.

DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12708

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