2022Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

TACL reviewing in still challenging times

The past year has continued to present many and varied difficulties for everyone, so we would again like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the fantastic work of all those who have contributed to TACL over 2021, including authors, reviewers, action editors and editorial staff. As will be shown below, we continue to grow yet are managing to sustain our improved turnaround time, for which everyone deserves some credit. So thank you to the team for maintaining the high standards of TACL.

Journal indexing

We are happy to announce that TACL is now listed in Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Many thanks to MIT Press for helping get us through this process, an important initiative for TACL that took several years to complete.

Personnel updates

Ani Nenkova's term as co-Editor-in-chief was set to expire in June of this year, but the ACL exec has approved a term extension until June 2024. Brian Roark's term was earlier extended to (and will expire at) the end of 2022. There is an active search for a new co-Editor-in-chief, see https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-fall-2022-december-2025 .

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
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  77  288     30   |  4.2  21.2  52.8  21.9  |   45.5 (11.7)   44
2021   72  89  83  70  314     36   |  6.4  24.2  48.1  21.3  |   46.0 (13.2)   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:

While the number of submissions grew a bit relative to 2020 (just under 10%), our decision performance has remained very consistent, both in terms of time to decision and the distribution of the decision categories. Note that 2 papers submitted in Q4 2020 were not included in last year's report, since decisions were still pending for those papers, hence the 2020 numbers have very slightly changed from that report.

Of the 48 (c) resubmissions during 2021, the decision percentages were: (a) 23%; (b) 32%; (d) 45%.

Number of TACL papers presented at conferences

79 TACL papers were presented at ACL-sponsored conferences in 2021: 27 at ACL, 6 at EACL, 18 at NAACL and 28 at EMNLP.

Publishing statistics

93 papers were published in vol. 8 (2020) compared with 54 in vol. 8 (2020) and 45 in vol. 7 (2019). This increase is due to the substantial increase in submissions to the journal.