Editorial: 2011 in Review

Excerpt

As has now been the case for several years, both the quality and quantity of research in autism has continued to increase dramatically. This past year, we instituted a policy of blinded reviews that has generally been found helpful by both authors and reviewers. We’ve also become more vigilant about the issue of duplicate publication and, sadly, have dealt with one instance of plagiarism (the first author was admonished, the paper rejected, and a letter went to the co-authors and the institution). During 2011, a record number of papers, reviews, and letters to the editor, 712 in total, were submitted. As in the past, the able staff both at Springer and my office and those of the associate editors have worked diligently to ensure that the papers conform to Journal guidelines before they are sent for review. As a practical matter, this means that most papers are returned quickly to the authors for revision even before going out for peer review. Whenever possible, we attempt to be expeditious with reviews—the turnaround time averaged about 8 weeks (with a few reviews being much faster and some being much slower). One of the problems that we, and other journals, face is ‘reviewer fatigue’. We have taken several steps to deal with the increase in submissions. The associate editors and I have now begun, occasionally to reject papers (about 5%) that we believe simply have little or no chance of making it through the peer review process. …