Report of the Editor of the Journal of Finance for the Year 2016

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12531
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• Author: STEFAN NAGEL
• Date: 01 August 2017

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE •VOL. LXXII, NO. 4 •AUGUST 2017

Report of the Editor of the Journal of Finance

for the Year 2016

STEFAN NAGEL, EDITOR

This is my first report as Executive Editor of The Journal of Finance. In July

2016, my Co-Editors Philip Bond, Amit Seru, and Wei Xiong and I took over

the reins at the Journal. The previous editorial team headed by Ken Singleton

with Co-Editors Bruno Biais and Michael Roberts handed over the Journal to

us in great shape. The outgoing editors have also been extremely helpful in

ensuring a smooth transition. Ken and his team will continue to handle papers

that were originally submitted to them and received a revise-and-resubmit.

Given that all of the papers that were originally submitted to us are still in

process at this point, the successes of the Journal highlighted in this report

largely reflect the excellent work of earlier editors.

I am happy to report that 2016 was another good year. We received 1,197 sub-

missions, of which 1,081 were new manuscripts and 116 were resubmissions.

In 2016, the Journal published 70 articles, written by authors whose primary

affiliations include 80 different institutions. Table Idetails 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 insti-

tution (where an article with nauthors is counted as 1/n articles for each

author’s institution). The institutions with the most Journal authors last year

were New YorkUniversity, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Texas

at Austin.

The Journal’s visibility and impact remain extremely high (see Table III).

The articles published in the Journal were cited 24,013 times in all journals

during 2015, a total that ranks first among business and finance journals and

third among all economics journals (behind the American Economic Review

and Econometrica). Our two-year impact factor (cites during 2015 to articles

published in 2013 and 2014, divided by the total number of articles published

in those two years) is 5.290 (down from 5.424 in 2014), which ranks first among

business and finance journals and fourth among all economics journals. The

five-year impact factor is 7.728 (up from 7.546 in 2014) and ranks third among

all economics journals (behind the Journal of Economic Literature and the

Quarterly Journal of Economics).

Figure 3tracks the total number of papers published in the top three finance

journals. The Journal published about the same number of articles as in 2015.

For many years now, both the JFE and the RFS have published more papers,

and the gap has remained stable in the recent past.

DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12531

1859

1860 The Journal of Finance R

Tabl e I

Submission and Resubmission Timing

2016 2015

Month Submissions Resub Total Month Submissions Resub Total

Jan. 82 6 86 Jan. 103 12 115

Feb. 81 8 89 Feb. 78 6 84

Mar. 95 4 99 Mar. 98 6 104

April 66 11 77 April 102 9 111

May 74 13 87 May 93 14 107

June 94 13 107 June 93 14 107

July 99 11 110 July 98 17 115

Aug. 99 15 114 Aug. 98 9 107

Sept. 101 13 114 Sept. 95 9 104

Oct. 100 7 107 Oct. 84 7 91

Nov. 101 4 105 Nov. 85 6 91

Dec. 89 11 100 Dec. 79 10 89

Total 1,081 116 1,197 Total 1,110 120 1,230

Turnaround times have continued to improve (see Table IV), with 73% of the

editorial decisions during 2016 taking less than 70 days and only 9.8% taking

over 100 days. Figure 1compares turnaround over the 2012–2016 period. The

median turnaround time decreased in 2016 to 40.5 days from 43 days in 2015.

The backlog of unpublished accepted articles is less than a year so there is a

fairly short time from acceptance to publication.

Table Vprovides information on the editorial decisions. The desk rejection

rate increased slightly to 39%. At the same time, the total number of revise-

and-resubmits rose in 2016 from 2015. Focusing on initial submissions, the

probability of an Editor asking for a revision increased substantially in 2016

to 11% from 5.4% in 2015. This huge increase is partly just a reversal of

an abnormally low revise-and-resubmit rate in 2015, some of which was due

to a backlog in processing revise-and-resubmits. The number of acceptances

decreased in 2016 compared to 2015. However, given the strong increase in the

number of revise-and-resubmits this year, we expect an increase in number of

accepted papers going forward. Figure 2shows that among accepted papers,

the proportion of those accepted after the first revision was 59%, which is

again mostly a reversal of an abnormally low number in 2015. The proportion

of papers accepted after two (three) revisions was 92% (98%) this year.

At the beginning of our term in July 2016, we made the decision to discon-

tinue the use of “reject-and-resubmit” at the JF. This policy change will likely

affect the editorial decision statistics going forward. In fact, one of the rea-

sons that lead us to refrain from issuing “reject-and-resubmits” is that they

reduce the transparency of the editorial process. How many of the papers that

a journal reports as “rejected” are actually “reject and resubmits”? How many

of the papers that are reported as accepted after the first round are actually

ones that had received a “reject and resubmit” earlier and are therefore, effec-

tively, papers that required two rounds of revisions? Furthermore, we felt that