Odd-numbered years represent a time of relative stability at the editorial offices of the Journal of Economic History. William Collins is in the second year of his four-year term as non-Eurasian editor, and Ann Carlos in her final year as senior editor and Eurasian editor. Eric Hilt continues his work as book review editor for the Americas, while Carol Shiue continues as book review editor for the rest-of-the-world. The Journal is fortunate in having Lily Welch continue as the Journal Editorial Assistant and Sally Sztrecska as Production Editor.
We have benefited greatly from the expert guidance and advice of our Board of Editors and the nearly 200 referees who have contributed their time and expertise to maintaining and enhancing the quality of the Journal. We are extremely grateful for and cannot overestimate their efforts. “Graduating seniors” at the Board are Hoyt Bleakley, Carlos Marichal, Chiaki Moriguchi, and Kirsten Wandschneider. We sincerely thank them for their service. The incoming board members include Latika Chaudhary, Johan Fourie, Robert Margo, John Tang, and Jessica Vechbanyongratana. Each will serve a four-year term. Numerous scholars contributed book reviews, including longer surveys, and a number of synthetic pieces. The editorial office is grateful to all who have worked on behalf of the Journal over this past year.
The number of submissions to the Journal is shown in Table 1. In pulling different information from the ScholarOne system, the editorial office realized that the number of new submissions was being systematically undercounted for some years now. So, as economic historians, we show in Table 1 the previously published data and the amended data for the last seven years. Essentially, we were undercounting the number of submissions by about 20 papers in each year for the last four years. These are papers that were submitted in June of the relevant year. For details, please contact the editors. Looking at the trend, the number of submissions jumped four years ago and has been trending down. Overall, the submission rate shows a slight decline in the number of submissions. Last year saw 162 submissions to 170 in the previous year. The publication ratio displayed is the number of refereed papers and notes published in the current year divided by the number of new papers submitted in the previous year. In 2016–2017, we published 32 articles. Because of the re-counting of submissions, the publication ratio has fallen to about 0.18 but remains in line with the recent past. Table 2 reports the response-time statistics for the corresponding sample. To place the numbers into context, our goal is to have a decision back to the author within 90 days. This year's performance has been roughly on par with other years for new submissions, with a median response time of 74. The median response time for all submissions has fallen to 50 days. A small number of papers have taken much longer. We apologize to authors of pieces experiencing long delays, some of which were the result of ScholarOne system issues and a very small number of tardy reviewers. We continuously work to reduce the time for this small number of authors taking into consideration that we are, of course, concerned about the quality of the response, not just its speed.
Table 1 SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION RATES
Table 2 RESPONSE TIME STATISTICS
The distributions of submissions are documented below. These data reflect the older accounting of the submissions data. They will be recalculated in next year's Editors' Notes; that said, we do not anticipate much change. We show the data for eras in Table 3 and for topics in Table 4. The automated part of the paper submission system stopped reporting on regions for a period of time, but that feature has recommenced. This, however, means that we do not have consistent comparisons over the last six years. What is currently available is shown in Table 5.
Table 3 DISTRIBUTION OF SUBMISSIONS BY ERA, MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PER SUBMISSION POSSIBLE
Table 4 DISTRIBUTION OF SUBMISSIONS BY TOPIC, MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PER SUBMISSION POSSIBLE
Table 5 DISTRIBUTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL AREA
*2014–2015 Region data are from 1 July 2014–14 October 2015.
**2015–2016 Region data are from 18 March 2016–30 June 2016.
Coverage remains broad with a continued growth in the twenty-first century as might be expected. The number of submissions on the twentieth century continues its surge passed the nineteenth century. Shown in Table 4, Growth, Political Economy, Demography and Labor are topic areas that dominated submissions.
Book reviews are an important component of the Journal, and we sincerely thank the many reviewers. We also remind our membership to have their press send a copy of any new books to the relevant book review editor. The Journal has also sought “review and reflection” synthetic articles, extended book reviews, and roundtable book reviews when appropriate. We published two Reviews and Reflections articles in Volume 77: “Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World” by Guido Alfani and Tommy Murphy in the March 2017 issue and “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism’” by Eric Hilt in the June 2017 issue.
Readers will recall that at the 2013 meetings, the EHA board of trustees approved a policy to make publication conditional on archiving the data sufficient to replicate the results in the accepted articles. The new rules read:
“It is the policy of the Journal of Economic History to publish papers only if the data used in the analysis are clearly and precisely documented and are readily available to any researcher for purposes of replication. Authors of accepted papers must archive, prior to publication, the data, programs, and other details of the computations sufficient to permit replication. These will be archived at ICPSR and a stable URL link to these data will published with each article. The Editors should be notified at the time of submission if the data used in a paper are proprietary or if, for some other reason, the requirements above cannot be met.
As soon as possible after acceptance, authors are expected to deposit their data, programs, and sufficient details to permit replication with ICPSR. Questions regarding any aspect of this policy should be forwarded to the Journal Editor.”
All new submissions from 1 January 2016 required authors to post data and replication files to maintain and advance the Journal's efforts to ensure transparency and scholarly integrity. A few papers submitted prior to this date are still in process and those authors have been strongly encouraged to follow the new policy. A branded page can be found with openICPSR and depositors can submit files into openICPSR per the instructions available at: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/openICPSR/JEH-deposit-instructions.pdf.
The editorial office and ICPSR continue to work to enhance the interface.
Referees for 2016 were:
Olivier Accominotti
Philipp Ager
Gani Aldashev
Sylvia Allegretto
Bob Allen
Carlos Alvarez Nogal
Pamfili Antipa
Leticia Arroyo Abad
Cihan Artunç
Ragui Assaad
Gareth Austin
Rudiger Bachmann
Martha Bailey
Andy Baker
Richard Baker
Gerben Bakker
Victoria Bateman
Joerg Baten
Brian Beach
Jessica Bean
Asaf Berstein
Hoyt Bleakley
Matthias Blum
Gustavo Bobonis
Howard Bodenhorn
Lars Boerner
Karol Borowiecki
Maristella Botticini
Leah Boustan
H. V. Bowen
George Boyer
Fabio Braggion
Stephen Broadberry
John Brown
Liam Brunt
Justin Bucciferro
Carsten Burhop
Charles Calomiris
Gareth Campbell
Forrest Capie
Leonard Carlson
Celeste Carruthers
Youssef Cassis
Benjamin Chabot
David Chambers
Eric Chaney
Latika Chaudhary
Gregory Clark
Karen Clay
David Clingingsmith
Patrick Coe
Lisa Cook
Lee A. Craig
Neil Cummins
Ludo Cuyvers
Tomas Cvrcek
Aditya Dasgupta
Alan de Bromhead
Melissa Dell
Catherine Desbarats
Livio Di Matteo
Mark Dincecco
Jordi Domenech
Fabian Drixler
Nicolas Duquette
Alan Dye
Zvi Eckstein
Marc Egnal
Tamer el-Leithy
Shari Eli
Jari Eloranta
Ruben Enikolopov
Steven A. Epstein
Katherine Eriksson
Jose-Antonio Espin-Sanchez
Thibault Fally
David Feeny
James Feigenbaum
James Fenske
Alan Fernihough
Daniel Fetter
Price Fishback
Jonathan Fisher
Caroline Fohlin
Mauricio Font
Johan Fourie
Ewout Frankema
Carola Frydman
Dustin Frye
David Galenson
Kenneth Garbade
Leigh Gardner
Samuel Garrido
R. Richard Geddes
James Gerber
Michela Giorcelli
William N. Goetzman
Rafael Gonzalez-Val
Kathryn Graddy
Regina Grafe
Amanda Gregg
Paul Gregory
Avner Greif
Ben Groom
Pauline Grosjean
Richard Grossman
Catherine Guirkinger
Federico Gutierrez
Michael Haines
Gillian Hamilton
Christopher Hanes
Leslie Hannah
C. Knick Harley
Timothy Hatton
Philipp Hauber
Joshua Hausman
Scott Hemphill
Carlos Eduardo Hernandez
Henning Hillmann
Richard Hornbeck
Erik Hornung
Elise Huillery
Robert Inklaar
Kris Inwood
Alejandra Irigoin
Douglas Irwin
Denis Ivanov
David Jacks
Andrew Jalil
Matthew Jaremski
Taylor Jaworski
Morten Jerven
Joost Jonker
Gisella Kagy
Morgan Kelly
Lionel Kesztenbaum
Zorina Khan
Sukkoo Kim
Christopher Kingston
Carl Kitchens
Edward Kosack
Sumner La Croix
Ryan Lampe
Tim Larsen
Tomas Larsson
Changkeun Lee
Sibylle Lehmann
Adrian Leonard
Margaret Levenstein
Byron Lew
Frank Lewis
Joshua Lewis
Dan Li
Amy Liu
Jonas Ljungberg
Jason Long
Dean Lueck
Seth Mallios
Robert Margo
James Markusen
Catherine Massey
Anne E. C. McCants
John J. McCusker
Terra McKinnish
Christopher Meissner
Guy Michaels
Grant Miller
Melinda Miller
David Mitch
Carolyn Moehling
Jon Moen
Alexander Moradi
Petra Moser
Carl Mosk
Jose Moya
Tomas Murphy
Aldo Musacchio
Suresh Naidu
Joana Naritomi
Larry Neal
Todd Neumann
Dennis Novy
Nathan Nunn
Cormac Ó Gráda
Trevor O'Grady
Donal O'Neill
Kevin O'Rourke
Mary O'Sullivan
Sheilagh Ogilvie
Claudia Olivetti
Alan L. Olmstead
Kim Oosterlinck
Alexander Opitz
Sonja Opper
Craig Palsson
Sevket Pamuk
John Parman
Elisabeth Perlman
Alexander Persaud
Leandro Prados de la Escosura
Nishith Prakash
Stephen Quinn
Roger Ransom
Sarah Reber
Scott Redenius
Riad Rezzik
Paul Rhode
Gary Richardson
Evan Roberts
Hugh Rockoff
Jonathan Rose
Elyce J. Rotella
Peter Rousseau
Jared Rubin
Mohamed Saleh
Laura Salisbury
Kristina Sargent
Walter Scheidel
Max-Stephan Schulze
John Sedgwick
Edson Severnini
Gary S. Shea
Allison Shertzer
Katharine Shester
Carol Shiue
Richard Sicotte
Petra Sijpesteijn
James Simpson
David P. Sims
Michael Sinkinson
Steven Smith
Kenneth A. Snowden
Yannay Spitzer
Steven Sprick Schuster
Richard Steckel
William Summerhill
Richard Sutch
Patrick Svensson
John Tang
Peter Temin
Sharon Tennyson
Michèle Tertilt
Jose Tessada
Werner Troesken
John Turner
Andrey Ukhov
Bas van Leeuwen
Marlous van Waijenburg
Jan Luiten Van Zanden
Jordi Vidal-Robert
Jacob Vigdor
Carlos Villarreal
Nico Voigtländer
Tamas Vonyo
Ilya Voskoboynikov
Daniel Waldenstrom
John Wallis
Patrick Wallis
Lorena Walsh
Randall Walsh
Marianne Wanamaker
Kirsten Wandschneider
Zachary Ward
Warren Weber
Marc Weidenmier
Bruce Weinberg
David C. Wheelock
Eugene White
Michelle White
Glenn Withers
Nikolaus Wolf
Gavin Wright
Robert Wright
Yiqing Xie
Guo Xu
Se Yan
Noam Yuchtman
Daniel Ziblatt
Nicolas Ziebarth
Ariell Zimran
