Since issue 57-1 (2022), LARR has shifted from a disciplinary to a thematic emphasis. The published thematic sections are not based on previously commissioned dossiers. On the contrary, the editor in chief, with feedback from the editorial team, organized freely submitted articles into thematic groups. This thematic organization makes LARR a great tool for learning about the significant and emerging themes in the field of Latin American studies. Salient topics in volume 57 (2022) were the political and decolonizing role of the arts, historical and epistemological reflections on the humanities and the social sciences in Latin America, the role of the middle classes in political changes in Brazil, disability studies, human rights, and political economy. The themes that our authors are working on in 2023 are gender and sexuality studies, Afro-Latin America, racism and xenophobia, environmental studies, the role of the judiciary, rethinking the war in Peru, puzzling socio-economic issues and, of course, public health and epidemics. Please, watch out for exciting debates coming up this year in LARR!
Despite the shift to an interdisciplinary emphasis, submissions in the humanities and social science disciplines continue to be strong. I would like to highlight that the discipline of economics is taking off in LARR thanks to the efforts of our new associate editor Rosaluz Durán, affiliated with the University of Lima in Peru. Other disciplines like history, literature, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies are also receiving high quality contributions. The political science discipline continues to be strong and has shifted its attention to less traditional topics for the field such as gender, sexual orientation, and race. Our film review section is also taking off with great contributions curated by our new associate editor Antonio Gómez of Tulane University. The book review section continues to produce quality reviews and its articles are amongst the most cited in LARR. We are delighted to announce that our impact and cite scores have increased significantly both in general and in the disciplines, as I will explain in more detail below.
At the 2023 LASA meeting, LARR is sponsoring several featured panels including a workshop where the public will be able to interact with the editorial team and learn publishing strategies, and a panel celebrating our authors in volume 57 who work on the topics of the LASA meeting, democracy and human rights. We will also be holding a reception to provide an opportunity for interaction between the editorial team and current and prospective authors as well as LARR readers.
Editorial team changes
After a couple of years of changes, our editorial team has reached greater stability. However, we have had to face some important challenges. LARR’s outstanding editorial manager for more than a decade, Sara Lickey, decided to retire. We are very grateful to Sara for her long-term dedication and professionalism and for helping us train her replacement. We are delighted to welcome our new editorial manager, Erin Gray, who has previous editorial experience, has learned quickly and is doing a great job from the start. LARR also changed editorial assistants. Nelson Marín Alarcón, a PhD student at the University of Florida, has replaced Daniel Fernandez Guevara to whom we are also indebted for his dedication to the journal.
Impact factor and Cite Score
LARR’s impact factor increased from 0.779 in 2020 to 1.272 in 2021! The score for 2022 has not been released at the time of this writing. The five-year impact factor is 1.352. The Cite Score in Scopus has risen from 1.2 in 2020 to 1.5 in 2021. The tracker for 2022 expects LARR’s cite score to continue rising to 1.6. While LARR scored lower for impact factor than our benchmark journals in 2020, we are proud to announce that LASA’s flagship journal is now scoring higher than other interdisciplinary journals in the field of Latin American studies.
We share these achievements with the previous editorial team led by Aníbal Pérez-Liñán who worked incredibly hard to raise LARR’s visibility and academic quality. I am also indebted to the insightful and hardworking associate editors who make up our current editorial team: Christopher Britt Arredondo (literature, George Washington University), Juan Carlos Callirgos (anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), Abby Córdova (politics and international relations, University of Notre Dame), Rosaluz Durán (economics, Universidad de Lima), Antonio Gómez (film reviews, Tulane), Fabrice Lehoucq (book reviews, University of North Carolina - Greensboro), Jana Morgan (politics and international relations, University of Tennessee), Pavel Shlossberg (cultural studies, Gonzaga), Joel Stillerman (sociology, Grand Valley State University), Heather Vrana (history, University of Florida) and Kevin Young (book reviews, University of Massachusetts Amherst).
Regarding discipline citing trends, LARR scored above the 90th percentile in literature (98th percentile), arts and humanities (95th percentile) and history (93rd percentile). Moreover, LARR’s Cite Score has risen substantially in every discipline in 2021 (fig. 1).Footnote 1
Figure 1. Cite Score trends by discipline. Source: Scopus Cite Score and Rank Trend.
Manuscripts received
Since the last editor’s report, between March 2022 and February 2023, LARR received 261 original manuscripts, 24 book review essays and 4 film review essays, a total of 289 submissions. This represents a decrease from the previous year when LARR received 332 manuscripts. We noted that during the long Covid-19 lockdown submissions increased 30 percent from previous years, as researchers seemed to have found more time to write. The current decrease in submissions may be a consequence of the research gap during the two years of lockdown. Another possible reason for the decrease in submissions is that we decided to close the option “other social sciences” that had a good number of submissions many of which were of poor quality and were almost never published.
The countries that submitted the greatest number of manuscripts were the United States (73) followed by Brazil (41), Colombia (26), Mexico (24), Chile (18), Spain (16), Argentina (15), and Ecuador (13) (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Manuscripts received in 2022-23 by country of residence of main author. Source: Cambridge ScholarOne system.
In terms of disciplines, LARR received the most submissions in politics and international relations (62) followed by economics (51), sociology (34), history (29), cultural studies (27), literature (17) and anthropology (17) (fig. 3). We would like to promote the literature discipline to increase submissions since we scored in the 98th percentile for Cite Score in that discipline. The editorial team is planning a special dossier for the anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising to evaluate its continental and global impact which will be edited by Mariana Mora from CIESAS, CDMX. We expect that that dossier will gain the attention of anthropologists and encourage them to submit their contributions to LARR.
Figure 3. Submissions by discipline. Source: Cambridge ScholarOne system.
*The graphic includes submissions by discipline expressed in percentages.
Acceptance rate and decisions made
The acceptance rate for research articles in LARR (ratio of submission to publication) for 2022 was 14.3 percent. The editorial team made 228 decisions of which 187 were final decisions from March 2022 to February 2023. Of all the decisions, 40 percent were desk rejects, 3.5 percent were rejected for being out of scope, 13.6 percent were rejected after a first round of review. Acceptances after one or two rounds of review accounted for 24.1 percent of decisions, and 18.8 percent of the decisions were revise and resubmits that are still in process. Out of all the final decisions, 70.3 percent were rejects and 29.4 percent were accepts (fig. 4).
Figure 4. Manuscripts by decision. Source: Cambridge ScholarOne system.
Processes and turnaround times
Submissions in Cambridge Scholar One system from January 2022 to February 2023:
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Time from submission to desk reject: 31 days
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Time from submission to rejection after first review: 127 days
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Time from submission to acceptance after one or two rounds of review: 223
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Time from acceptance of the final manuscript to publication 46 days
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Time from submission to publication: 269 days
Submissions in Ubiquity Press system in 2021:
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Submission to desk reject: 41.96 days
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Submission to rejection after first or second round of review: 114 days
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Submission to acceptance after one or two rounds of review: 144.6 days
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Time from acceptance to publication: 300 days
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Total time from submission to publication: 684 days
Time comparison between 2021-2022
There is good news regarding turnaround times. There has been a substantial decrease in the overall turnaround and publication times of LARR (Table 1). The time from submission to internal rejection decreased by 11 days. The time from acceptance to publication decreased by 254 days on average. The time from submission to publication decreased by 415 days, thanks in part to the FirstView feature that Cambridge University Press has made possible. However, the time from submission to rejection after review has increased, although only slightly, a process we need to evaluate more closely and improve. The time from submission to acceptance after review has increased even more. The reason is that due to the Covid-19 pandemic several authors asked for extensions (sometimes of several months) to upload their revisions. We have been flexible in granting such extensions given the circumstances of the pandemic, as authors have been dealing with health issues as well as with their children being at home for extended periods of time. The care issues have particularly affected female authors and might have had an impact on the increase in the times from submission to acceptance. While we do not regret showing empathy and considering equality, we need to further evaluate how granting extensions might affect LARR’s turnaround times.
Table 1. Turnaround times for 2021 and 2022
*The year 2022 includes submissions in Cambridge Scholar One System from January 2022 to February 2023
Articles published in volume 57 (2022)
LARR published 41 research articles, 18 book reviews, 2 film reviews and 1 editorial, for a total of 62 publications in the four issues of volume 57. Including all the authors of multiauthor articles, 58 percent were men and 42 percent were women. This appears to represent a decrease in the number of female authors from the previous year, when 55 percent of the main authors were female. A possible reason, again, could be childcare and other care responsibilities that might have fallen more heavily on women during the public health crisis.
Most of the authors published had an institutional affiliation in the United States, followed by Mexico, Spain, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. Thirty-one percent of the authors work in North America, 39.6 percent in Latin America, and 27 percent in Europe. The disciplines with the greatest representation in the volume were literature, cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, and history. Fifty-one percent of the articles were published in English, 42 percent in Spanish and 7 percent in Portuguese (figs 5-6).
Figure 5. Publication by country; volume 57 (2022).
*The graphic includes the country of institutional affiliation of co-authors in a single publication.
Figure 6. Publications by subject area; volume 57 (2022).
LARR-University of Florida award
In coordination with the University of Florida and LASA, LARR offers an award to the best article in each volume. The winner is recognized at the LASA Congress and receives a certificate and a monetary prize. This year, the winner is Magdalena Gil for the article “Disasters as Critical Junctures: State Building and Industrialization in Chile after the Chillán Earthquake of 1939.” Magdalena is an assistant professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (fig. 7). She has a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. Her areas of expertise are disaster studies, the sociology of risk and social studies of science and technology.
Figure 7. LARR-UF best article award winner Magdalena Gil, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
The committee that chose her article included Dr. Rosaluz Duran, associate editor for economics, LARR and associate professor of Economics, Universidad de Lima, Perú; Emily Hind, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Florida; and Vanessa Miseres, associate professor of Spanish, University of Notre Dame, and winner of the 2022 LARR-UF best article award.
Conclusion
LARR has continued to improve its impact and citation indicators while restoring its interdisciplinary tradition and consolidating its role as a leading journal in the field of Latin American studies. The editorial team, with the support of Cambridge University Press, has dramatically shortened the time from submission to publication. In addition, LARR offers open access publication and is able to grant waivers to all authors who do not have institutional or grant funds earmarked for open access publication. We hope that these improvements and advantages will encourage more emerging and established authors to choose LARR as the ideal outlet to publish their research. We also have confidence that LARR’s readers will continue to find the interdisciplinary thematic sections and the book and the film review essays relevant for their research and teaching needs.
Open access
