Dear readers, authors, and reviewers,
As this editorial team enters its fourth year working together, there are many exciting changes and news that we would like to share with the academic community that LARR serves. We continue organizing freely submitted articles into themes for each issue, which makes LARR a great tool to learn about emerging and current debates in Latin American studies. Some topics published in 2023 that have caught the attention of our readers are Afro-Latin America, racism and xenophobia, environmental studies, gender and sexuality, politics and the judiciary, urban crime, public health, and a fantastic section revisiting the internal conflict in Peru published in issue 58-4. In the first two issues of 2024, we highlighted human rights, crime and violence, art and artivism, the anthropology of food, the Cuban economy, Inter-American relations, and new approaches to historical studies. As you can see, LARR has published articles on a variety of themes that are significant to our academic community and to the Latin American region.
Regarding changes to the journal, we have added the discipline of Geography, and Eric Carter of Macalester College has joined the team as the incoming associate editor for this subject area. Authors interested in environmental studies and natural resource extraction, among other topics salient to Geography may now find a great outlet for publication and interesting pieces to read in LARR.
Apart from freely volunteered articles, we are working on several guest-edited dossiers, the first of which will be on climate change and the fate of glaciers in South America. It will be an interdisciplinary collection of articles that touches on the social, political and environmental aspects of glacier studies and their conservancy in Latin America. Cambridge University Press is relaxing page budget restrictions for its open access, online journals, which will make it possible for us to continue publishing selected thematic dossiers.
Please note that there are several important benefits to publishing in LARR. The journal is one hundred percent Gold Open Access, which amplifies the impact of your publication and the chance that it will be cited. Also, authors have several avenues to publish open access without incurring any cost. Many institutions have “transformative research and publish agreements” with Cambridge University Press which allows authors to publish without personal cost. If your institution is not one of these, LARR grants waivers to all authors who apply. An important benefit for early career scholars is that we have significantly shortened turnaround times and have made the review process more agile and transparent. In addition, we count on the experience and prestige of Cambridge University Press to promote our publications and the journal as a whole.
The editorial team has been giving many workshops to teach prospective authors how to navigate the review process more effectively. Some of these have been at conferences in the US and others in Latin America. I am currently teaching a course as a Fulbright scholar at Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil where I will present one of these publishing workshops. At LASA 2024 in Bogotá, we organized a collaborative panel with the editors of Latin American Perspectives, Latino Studies, Small Axe, and Meridians. We also had a reception to thank our readers, authors, reviewers and editorial team. Finally, we had a ceremony to honor the authors who won the LARR/University of Florida Best Article Award.
Editorial team changes
As noted above, Dr. Eric Carter joined our team as the new associate editor for Geography. Eric is an expert in Latin American public health and human-environment relations. He will contribute to strengthen LARR’s focus on key topics in Latin American studies such as illness, epidemics and climate change.
Christopher Britt-Arredondo, former associate editor of Literature, and Professor of Spanish at George Washington University, had to leave the team for personal reasons. He did a wonderful job attracting cutting edge literary theory and research to LARR. We are very thankful to Christopher for his dedicated service. The new editor for the Literature section is Vanesa Miseres, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Miseres will strengthen LARR’s existing focus on gender, women writers and violence.
Our great editorial assistant, Nelson Marín Alarcón, graduated with a PhD in religion with a focus on Latin America. We thank Nelson for his dedication and insight. He has been replaced by Maria Victoria Muñoz, a PhD candidate in the Spanish department at the University of Florida. Her research area of interest is women’s literature in Latin America. We give Vicky the warmest welcome to the team!
CiteScore and impact factor of LARR
LARR’s Scopus CiteScore grew from 1.5 in 2021 to 1.7 in 2022. The CiteScore is calculated by dividing the citations in the period from 2019-2022 by the number of articles published in the same period. LARR ranks in the 98th percentile in Literature and Literary Theory, in the 93rd percentile in History and in the 85th percentile in Cultural Studies. The journal has been consistently improving its CiteScore in the rest of the disciplines that LARR publishes. The 2022 five-year impact factor of LARR is 1.2 and its two-year impact factor, which is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published during the previous two years by the number of citable items, is 0.8. It is important to take into account a variety of metrics since multidisciplinary social science and humanities journals such as LARR score better when a longer range of time is considered.
Processes and turnaround times
LARR’s editorial team has been able to substantially improve the turnaround times of the journal! This is great news for early career scholars and for authors seeking promotion who will be able to profit from faster review and publication times. The days to first decision have been reduced from 120 days in 2022 to 80 days in 2023. The days to final decision have been reduced from 160 days in 2022 to 79 days in 2023. The production time has been reduced from 51 days in 2022 to 35 days in 2023 (Figure 1).
Turnaround times. Source: Cambridge University Press Publishers Report for Latin American Research Review, April 2024.
Usage of Latin American Research Review
The usage of LARR’s platform has grown substantially in the last year, giving our authors more exposure to their academic audiences. This exposure is international in nature. Most articles are downloaded in the United States, but there are many downloads from Latin America, Europe, and, particularly, from China, which is the country that ranks second by number of downloads from LARR’s platform after the United States (Figures 2 and 3). An advantage of publishing in LARR is the expanded interest in our publications, which will eventually result in more citations.
Downloads by platform. Source: Cambridge University Press Publishers Report, April 2024.
Downloads by country. Source: Cambridge University Press Publishers Report, April 2024.
Manuscripts received
LARR received 203 research articles (199 articles and 4 debates), 7 research notes, 24 book review essays, 3 film review essays and 1 editorial in 2023, for a total of 238 submissions. Figure 4 lists the submissions by country.
Manuscripts received by country. Source: ScholarOne reports.
LARR received 31 percent of submissions from the United States, 39 percent from Latin America, and 30 percent from Europe and the rest of the world. In Latin America, the countries that submitted the most articles were Brazil (8 percent), Chile (7.6 percent), Colombia (7.1 percent) and Mexico (5.5 percent). In Europe, the country that submitted the most articles was Spain (8.8 percent). These numbers show that LARR is a truly international journal that is representative of LASA’s academic community.
In terms of disciplines, 27.7 percent of the total articles submitted were submitted in Politics and International Relations, 12.2 percent in Sociology, 12.2 percent in Economics, 10.9 percent in Cultural Studies, 8.4 percent in Literature, 6.7 percent in History, 6.3 in Anthropology and 0.4 in the recently added discipline of Geography. We hope to grow our submissions in all disciplines, particularly Geography (Figure 5).
Acceptance rate and decisions made
The acceptance rate for research articles in LARR in 2023 was 19.5 percent. The editorial team made 430 decisions of which 32.5 percent were desk rejects, 17 percent were rejects after one or more rounds of review, 18.1 percent were decisions of major revisions and 12.8 percent of submissions required minor revisions (Figure 6).
Manuscripts received by discipline. Source: Author.
Manuscript decisions. Source: ScholarOne reports.
Articles published
LARR published 46 articles, 17 book review essays, 2 documentary film review essays and one editorial in volume 58 (2023), for a total of 63 contributions. Of all the corresponding authors, 39.6 percent were women. The articles published by country in 2023 are shown in Figure 7 which highlights LARR’s broad geographic reach and the fact that its authors are coming from a diversity of countries in North America, Latin America and beyond.
Articles published by country. Source: Author.
Figure 8 shows that the discipline of Economics, which was a historically weak section, has grown a great deal at LARR. Politics and International Relations continues to be a strong discipline as does History. Literature and Cultural Studies were separated into two different areas, but continue to receive high quality submissions which places LARR in the 98th and 85th percentile, respectively, according to Scopus CiteScore in these disciplines. Anthropology has grown both in terms of output and quality. Sociology published high-quality articles in volume 58, for example, the article by Cecilia Menjívar and Leydy Diossa-Jímenez on familyism ideologies and women’s rights in Central America published in issue 58-3.
Articles published by discipline. Source: Author.
LARR-University of Florida Best Article award winners Jelke Boesten and Lurgio Gavilán.
LARR-University of Florida Best Article Award
The 2024 committee for the LARR-University of Florida Best Article Award consisted of Jana Morgan, associate editor of LARR and Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee; Tace Hedrick, Professor of English at the University of Florida; and Magdalena Gil, past awardee and assistant professor of Government at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The committee chose the article “Military Intimacies: Peruvian Veterans and Narratives about Sex and Violence” by Jelke Boesten from Kings College, London and Lurgio Gavilán from Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga, Perú (Figure 9). We are grateful to the committee for their thoughtful service. Congratulations to the authors for a fascinating article!
Conclusion
LARR continues to publish important articles on current and urgent Latin American topics such as human rights, gender and sexuality, race, democracy, the environment, and others. We hope that this fascinating research output serves our diverse Latin American Studies Association academic audience well. LARR has also worked to improve the experience for our authors. Authors can now publish open access at no personal cost, they have an international academic audience eager to download their latest research, and the turnaround time and the time to publication —a big problem for LARR in the past—has been substantially reduced making LARR more attractive to early career authors. We have also served our scholarly community with workshops and at conferences to familiarize them with our submission and publication processes. We are looking forward to continuing to interact with an engaged and diverse range of readers, authors and reviewers!
Open access
