2021Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

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TACL in the time of Covid-19

This has been a remarkably difficult year for everyone, and we would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the fantastic work of all those who have contributed to TACL over 2020, including authors, reviewers, action editors and editorial staff. As will be shown below, we had significantly more submissions in 2020 than ever before, yet managed to reduce our mean time to decision compared with previous years, despite the extra burdens on people's time due to the pandemic. This really is a community endeavor, and the community stepped up in a huge way this past year, so THANKS!

Journal indexing

With the assistance of MIT Press, we applied for inclusion in major indexing services such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). Happily, TACL was accepted for inclusion in Scopus in May, 2020, and the process of including it in the index is underway. The decision on inclusion in WoS is still pending. We were earlier approved and have been included in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Personnel updates

Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ended in June 2020, at which point TACL reverted to having two co-EiCs. Mark was instrumental in several high priority initiatives at TACL, including the move to a professionally administered submission system, and the application process for indexing. The remaining editorial staff at TACL extend our heartfelt thanks to him for his efforts during his term.

Brian Roark’s term was set to end in June of 2021, but the ACL exec has approved a term extension until the end of 2022. Ani Nenkova's term is set to expire in June, 2022.

To adequately deal with increasing submissions (see numbers below), we have grown our roster of Action Editors (AEs), from around 50 in 2019 to around 80 now, as well as our standing reviewer pool, from roughly 230 in 2019 to our current 350. This has allowed us to keep pace with submissions while maintaining our “one person, one paper” workload objective. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

Statistics

Number of submissions, days to first decision and distribution of decisions

In the table below, we present statistics on submissions to TACL over the past five years. These include the total number of submissions, broken down by quarter, as well as the peak number of submissions in any month of that year. The results also include the distribution of paper decisions (see key below) and how long it took to reach those decisions, mean with standard deviation and median.

       === submissions ===    peak  |  === decision pct. ===  | days to 1st decision
Year   Q1  Q2  Q3  Q4 total   month |  (a)   (b)   (c)   (d)  |   mean (std)  median
2016   44  29  31  58  162     21   |  4.3  24.1  41.4  30.2  |   52.4 (17.1)   49
2017   33  35  46  67  181     25   |  6.6  16.0  49.2  28.2  |   55.2 (15.4)   53
2018   41  19  40  54  154     20   |  3.2  24.7  45.5  26.6  |   54.4 (14.4)   53
2019   39  39  38  51  167     29   |  3.6  23.4  43.1  29.9  |   50.1 (13.1)   48 
2020   71  65  75  75  286     30   |  4.2  21.3  52.8  21.7  |   45.2 (11.2)   44

(a) = accepted as is
(b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
(c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
(d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Observations:

We see that the number of submissions increased dramatically in 2020, by over 100 papers compared to our earlier peak year. This increase was due to a consistent increase in monthly volume rather than any dramatically higher peaks, as our peak month of 30 was just one more than the peak month in 2019.

Our mean time to first decision has reduced again, as has the variance, so that we are now on average right at our target duration of a month and a half. That we were able to handle this extra volume of papers -- during the pandemic no less -- while maintaining our ideal of fast decision turnaround is entirely due to our dedicated reviewers and action editors (plus Cindy for the helpful reminders), for whom the editors are profoundly grateful.

Of the 48 (c) resubmissions during 2020, the decision percentages were: (a) 23%; (b) 33%; (d) 44%

Number of TACL papers presented at conferences

58 TACL papers were presented at virtual ACL-sponsored conferences in 2020: 32 at ACL and 26 at EMNLP.

Publishing statistics

54 papers were published in vol. 8 (2020) compared with 45 in vol. 7 (2019) and 48 in vol. 6 (2018).