Note from the Editors: <i>Politics and Policy</i> 2010‐11—Submissions, Acceptance Rate, and Acknowledgement of Reviewers

As we prepare to celebrate Politics & Policy's 40th year of publication next year, we would like to thank all of those scholars and professionals who have invested their time, effort, intellectual rigor, critical perspective, and a host of other resources in the service of the journal in 2011. We acknowledge our deep appreciation to Politics & Policy's Editorial Board, several of whom have served the journal since before our time as Editors began in 2005. In particular, we would like to thank John Owens, Gaspare Genna, and Ed Portis for serving on the Best Paper Selection Committee for the George H. Cox Prize for the Best Politics & Policy Article published in 2010. Their final judgment named Mark McBeth, Donna L. Lybecker, and Kaycee A. Garner as the winners for their article, “The Story of Good Citizenship: Framing Public Policy in the Context of Duty-Based vs. Engaged Citizenship.” Every visitor to the Politics & Policy website will have free access to this article for the coming year. We are also grateful to the members of the State Political Science Associations who have supported this journal, past and present, in terms of article submissions, peer reviews, and past Editorial Board duties. Volume 39 has spanned a time of endings and beginnings. Our long-time Editorial Assistant and Managing Editor, Cynthia Villegas, who endowed the journal with her consummate organizational skills for five years, left the Editorial Office earlier in the year to pursue her academic career in Australia. We express our heartfelt gratitude for everything that Cynthia did to make our lives easier and ensure the journal ran smoothly, and wish her every success for the future. Taking over the administrative reins of the Editorial Office, we welcome our new Managing Editor, Rafael Delfin, who has already made his mark on journal procedures, and has quickly become a wizard at negotiating the more complex elements of Manuscript Central with ease for authors and editors alike. We are very much looking forward to seeing many of his innovative strategies for the future online publication of Politics & Policy put into practice over the coming months. Our thanks again go to the sterling work that key personnel at Wiley-Blackwell publishers continue to perform for the journal. Production Editor Josh Gannon, Senior Managing Editor Kivmars Bowling, Technical “Guru” Kris Bishop, and our tireless and eternally positive proofreader Carol DiPalermo do much to make life easy for the members of the Editorial Office as well as enhance the quality and expand the reach of your articles—which are now accessible to over 3,400 libraries worldwide. The spirited discussions we have had with them, and the pioneering ideas they have shared with us to enhance the journal in the future and the academic publishing industry as a whole, have been extremely encouraging, despite the serious effects the current economic climate has had on many academic journals. As always, we are indebted to the indefatigable work, sound negotiation strategies, financial management and support, and constant stream of new ideas and comparative perspectives from all at the Policy Studies Organization (PSO). The collaboration and cross-fertilization of procedures, networks, and forward-thinking practices that are shared between the editors of all the journals in the PSO fold have brought inventive troubleshooting, enthusiasm, and a good dash of critical perspective to Politics & Policy. We thank Paul Rich and Daniel Gutierrez of the PSO for organizing the editors' meetings and exchanges that have been a highlight of our editorial calendar and a huge source of mutual support at a time when academic journals are changing rapidly. It has really been a great way to keep abreast of the new possibilities and new media available to the journal. And finally, we acknowledge our appreciation and great respect for the many peer reviewers who have reported so diligently and punctually on the submissions we receive. We are well aware that so many academics today are placed under inordinate pressure to review for multiple journals to very tight deadlines in an environment where many institutions do not recognize or reward this painstaking task. For this reason, “reviewer fatigue” is rife and declining any or all requests from editors for reviews certainly seems to be a rational choice. This makes it all the more important to recognize that those scholars who do devote their time to reviewer duties form the main support on which any peer-reviewed academic journal rests. We cannot write, edit, or publish quality periodical research without them. Politics & Policy's reviewers continue to impress us with their detailed, rigorous, constructively critical reports. As any reader will know if they have submitted a manuscript to this journal, our reviewers are as outstanding for the meticulous suggestions for improvement they provide to our authors as they are for the clear and unequivocal guidance they offer for us to make fair and feasible editorial decisions. By way of thanks, a list acknowledging every reviewer who reported on a Politics & Policy manuscript from September 1, 2010 to September 1, 2011 follows this Editors' Note. Submissions have stayed within last year's range in terms of quantity and quality. As the data in Table 1 show, the journal is continuing to attract a relatively balanced distribution of submissions across the subfields we identify, underscoring the generalist character of Politics & Policy. The data we have accumulated over the past five years now provide the basis for several further observations concerning the range and subject matter of the manuscripts received. While the journal's staple research remains focused on U.S. politics and policy, since 2005 our editorial vision has sought to widen the scope of the journal by including comparative perspectives from other countries and the international arena. Table 1 reveals a steady increase in these areas from 2007 in addition to the special issues we have published in these fields. Another interesting, although perhaps not wholly surprising, trend has been a shift away from submissions on terrorism and security issues toward those dealing with migration/immigration, regionalism, and participation and democracy. We are especially interested in considering more submissions in these areas in the future. We are pleased to report that our turnaround times have been further reduced over the last two years. We do all we can to make an initial decision within ten to twelve calendar days of a new submission so that authors whose articles are not selected for review can resubmit elsewhere swiftly. This early stage of the process is nevertheless held up if authors submit manuscripts containing information that identifies themselves, which still happens more than we would like. A final check always helps. From August 2010 to August 2011, the average turnaround time for manuscripts that we sent for external review was 64 calendar days (or 45 working days) from submission date to editorial decision after peer review. This compares with 63 calendar days in 2009-10, 68 days in 2008-09, and 77 days in 2007-08. Table 2 sets out our editorial decisions for the period August 2010 to August 2011. This breakdown and the subsequent acceptance rate do not include articles submitted for the annual special issue. The “rollover” nature of most journal production systems makes it difficult to pinpoint a constant acceptance rate for any given period because there are generally a number of manuscripts submitted for which an editorial decision is still pending (i.e., manuscripts that are still out for review or have not yet been resubmitted). However, it is possible to provide a range. In 2010-11, our rejection rate was at least 73 percent, making the highest possible acceptance rate of 27 percent (i.e., if all manuscripts pending a decision are accepted). Our estimate of the final figures thus indicates that the accurate range of this year's acceptance rate is likely to be 24-26 percent. We believe this is a respectable figure, particularly for a bimonthly publication, and we will continue to devote much of our journal development activities to reducing it further, thus increasing the quality of the articles we publish and the prestige this lends to their authors. In other areas of journal development, we have worked alongside Wiley-Blackwell and the PSO to broaden the reach of the journal's articles. One very good indicator that Politics & Policy is moving from strength to strength despite the effects the economy has had on other journals is the huge increase we have seen in full-text accesses. In 2010, the number of articles downloaded online rose by 34 percent on 2009 figures. The trend toward single-article online use is now well and truly set. In consequence, as of January 2012, all the PSO journals will be moving exclusively to online publication—which brings with it a wide range of opportunities for both authors and readers. We will be better equipped to provide more embedded fast links to references and original data sources, handy links to related articles, author webpages and related media, and extra virtual issues that draw together in one place top articles or those based on a single theme. This will not only make the journal more user-friendly and responsive to the teaching and research needs of its readers. In doing so, it should also serve authors by increasing citation hits, widening audiences, and re-releasing their past articles with all the attendant publicity that Wiley-Blackwell can provide. These are fast-moving, exciting times that Politics & Policy can and should take advantage of. Therefore, to launch our celebration of the journal's 40th volume in January, we are releasing the first of these “extra” virtual issues, which takes a retrospective look at some of the best original research and the most popular articles from Politics & Policy's past. All of the virtual issues we have planned for the coming 18 months will run in addition to the journal's customary six issues and will have free access for a limited period. And, for a while at least, we will be producing a very small print run of hard copies of volume 40. So for any subscriber who just has to have tangible copies (and still has enough room in their office to keep them), we should be able to oblige if you contact us early enough. We hope you will join us in anticipating what is already proving to be a landmark in the journal's long history next year. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the articles in this last issue of volume 39 and encourage you to continue to send your best articles, review essays, and book reviews to Politics & Policy.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.