Some Blog Statistics

The blog’s editors, with the help of our Associate Editor Tal Gross, prepared some statistics for the recent annual meeting of the EJIL Editorial and Scientific and Advisory Boards, which may also be of interest to our readers and authors. A summary of the salient points is as follows. In the August 2023-August 2024 period, the blog published 314 substantive posts. Other than the 45 posts which were written by the editors, practically all of the posts we published were received as unsolicited submissions. To our best recollection, with the exception of book discussions only one substantive post was solicited over the whole of the past year. We received 640 submissions, of which we rejected 371 and accepted 269 (often after comments and sometimes multiple rounds of revisions). That is, our rejection rate is about 60%.

Two points here are important for prospective authors. First, don’t be discouraged if your submission is rejected – that happens to most submissions that we receive.  We accept posts that make genuinely original, novel contributions to scholarship, and do not accept posts that replicate content that has already been published on EJIL:Talk! or elsewhere. Excellence is a necessary condition for publication, but it is not always a sufficient condition. When reviewing submissions, we are sometimes in the position to provide comments to the author on why their submission was rejected, but workload constraints are often such that we cannot provide feedback.

Second, if you feel that a certain perspective is missing on the blog, it is important to bear in mind that our content is generated mainly by the submissions we receive. That is, if you feel something is missing then please write a piece for us, or encourage someone else to do so (subject to quality considerations set out above). We can’t publish what we don’t receive. Soliciting submissions is very difficult to do with any regularity because of the constraints on our time, and because we receive such a large volume of unsolicited work, which we have to review. Furthermore, it is quite frankly more difficult to exercise quality control over submissions that have been solicited. And soliciting submissions might have the perverse effect of privileging those authors who are more well known (or who are known to us).