Report to the Readership

Abstract

This issue marks the end of our final year as Editors of Exceptional Children. We began our editorship with the traditional hard-copy mailing of manuscripts to authors, field reviewers, and publisher; then we moved to an electronic portal site with BePress. More recently, Exceptional Children moved to a new portal site with SAGE: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ ecx for submission of manuscripts. Online versions of accepted manuscripts now appear to read and review prior to the Exceptional Children hard-copy publication (http://ecx.sagepub.com/). This feature allows more convenient full access to all manuscripts as they are accepted for publication in Exceptional Children. We are pleased to report that Exceptional Children now has a 1-year impact factor of 2.745, and a 5-year impact factor of 3.016, which is presently the highest impact factor of any special education journal according to Thomson Reuters (2015). This is an excellent rating for the journal, and means that articles in Exceptional Children are cited more frequently by other scholars than articles appearing in other special education journals. We are optimistic that Exceptional Children will be able to continue to maintain its high level of visibility in the future. Over the past year, Exceptional Children received 112 original manuscript submissions. Across the SAGE and BePress portal sites 22 manuscripts were accepted for publication, resulting in a 19.6% acceptance rate. Seventy-one manuscripts were rejected and 45 manuscripts were in various stages of revision. All manuscripts that were accepted had initially received a revise and resubmit initial decision. During this period, the time from initial decision to author resubmission ranged from 1 month to over a year. Although we received a high number of submissions last year, Exceptional Children is always interested in receiving additional submissions, particularly of outstanding manuscripts that describe new and better methods for improving the lives of exceptional individuals. As in previous years, Exceptional Children continues to publish articles representing a wide range topics, research methodologies, and target populations. Volume 81 has maintained this tradition by including articles addressing such topics as social-behavioral functioning, literacy and language, math, and social studies, as well as other topics including teaching and teacher education, educational placement, parents and families, and characteristics of exceptional populations. These latter articles have featured subgroup analysis, prevalence, relative access to general education settings, and population needs. Figure 1 displays graphically these main focus areas. A varied range of special populations was addressed in Volume 81. Articles addressed students considered at risk; students who are deaf and hard of hearing; students with autism spectrum disorder, mild disabilities, intellectual disability, learning disabilities, emotional disabilities and behavioral disorders; special and general education; and teachers and families (see Figure 2). More often than in previous decades, individuals representing several disability categories were included in individual studies. Race and ethnicity were also distributed among participants in the research, including White, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, and Asian American students, as well as those of mixed race or ethnicity. All grade levels--preschool, elementary, and secondary--were represented in these articles, as shown in Figure 3. …