2014Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

TACL published 35 papers in 2013, and at the time of writing (February 2014) it has published 8 papers in 2014. Papers have been presented at various conferences including ACL 2013 (16 papers), NAACL 2013 (6 papers), EMNLP 2013 (5 papers), and EACL 2014 (2 papers). The current estimate, which should be final, is that 19 papers will be presented at ACL 2014.

Submission Numbers

The total number of papers submitted in 2013 was 117. The number of papers submitted each month was as follows:

Jan 10
Feb 4
Mar 11
Apr 3
May 11
Jun 10
Jul 8
Aug 8
Sep 11
Oct 13
Nov 18
Dec 15

Acceptance Rates, and Reviewing Times

At the time of writing 109 papers submitted in 2013 had received first decisions, with 8 papers still having pending decisions.

On receiving reviews for a paper, the action editor makes 1 of 4 decisions for the paper: (a) Acceptance for publication as is, with encouragement to make minor revisions. (b) Acceptance for publication subject to specified revisions within two months. (c) Rejection with encouragement to revise and resubmit within 3-6 months. (d) Rejection with no possibility of resubmission within a moratorium period of one year.

Of the 109 papers from 2013 with decisions, the breakdown by decision type was as follows:

Category a: 4 papers (3.7%)
Category b: 22 papers (20.2%)
Category c: 38 papers (34.9%)
Category d: 45 papers (41.3%)

It is worth noting that papers falling into category (b) are almost always accepted when the required revisions are carried out.

The mean time to first decision on a paper was 64 days for the 109 papers. Some other statistics on time to first decision (where a month is counted as 30 days):

 22 papers  (20%) had 1 month  13 days or less 
 44 papers  (40%) had 1 month  22 days or less
 66 papers  (60%) had 2 months  5 days or less
 88 papers  (80%) had 2 months 23 days or less
100 papers  (90%) had 3 months 17 days or less
109 papers (100%) had 4 months 29 days or less