Editorial Judgment Research Articles

Editor's Comments

Editor's Comments The deadline has passed for the submission of manuscripts for the special issue of Studies in American Fiction on Mark Twain. The editorial boards are now engaged in reading through scores of manuscripts, and we will feature the best of these articles in the Autumn 1985 issue. We have been most impressed by the extent and quality of current Twain scholarship, and we are grateful to everyone who submitted an essay for consideration . We have been asked to make a number of announcements about other journals in the field that will be of interest to our readers. Legacy, a biannual journal of nineteenthcentury American women writers, is currently soliciting manuscripts. Essays in biography, bibliography, literary and intellectual history, as well as critical interpretation are all welcome and should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style. Contributions should be sent to Legacy, Department of English, Bartlett Hall, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Mass. 01003. The Southern Quarterly is seeking articles for a special issue on Stark Young and his place in American literary history. Please direct manuscripts to Robert Peterson, Department of English, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 37132. James B. Carothers and John T. Matthews are soliciting contributions to the Faulkner Journal, the first issue of which will appear in September of 1985. Essays should conform to the second edition of the MLA Handbook and follow the procedures for anonymous submissions. All contributions should be addressed to the managing editor, Charles M. Oliver, Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio 45810. The Kansas Quarterly has announced a special issue on William Inge. Contributions should be sent by September 1, 1985, to Robert Kent Donovan, Department of History, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506. We are honored to add to our Advisory Editorial board Per Seyersted (University of Oslo) and Sergio Perosa (University of Venice), both of whom will be well known to our readers for their work on American literature. We are grateful to them for their willingness to assist us in bringing a truly international perspective to our editorial judgment, and we look forward to working with them in the years ahead. I would also like to welcome to our office our new graduate assistant, Catherine Adamowicz, who brings a cheerful energy to all tasks. She has been devoting much of her time to advertising but assists with virtually every aspect of the production of the journal. We are thankful for her dedicated help. J.N. ...

Atlas of Surgical Operations

There are not many security blankets that grown men drag around with them for 45 years. But Atlas of Surgical Operations —of which the 1983 version is the fifth edition—is one. It has been an important crutch for a generation of surgical residents and students. Any fifth edition must be judged on the basis of its predecessors. Added in the 1983 edition are eight new procedures and 23 new drawings, which cover subjects such as fundoplication, Roux-en-Y gastrojejunostomy and vagotomy, and total pancreatectomy, plus certain vascular procedures that the authors judge should be performed by general surgeons. A subtitle could have been added: For General Surgeons. Reflecting the burgeoning of surgery, this book has grown to a total of 206 chapters and 437 pages. Editorial judgment in selection of subjects obviously had to be exercised. In defending the crumbling frontiers of general surgery, they still bravely include nine gynecologic operations

Editors, manuscripts, and equal treatment

The question of equity in the manuscript evaluation process is receiving greater attention—perhaps becuase of the increasing difficulty of publishing and an expanding interest in due process and equal treatment. Attention is usually focused on the relationship between contributors' characteristics (e.g., age, institutional affiliation) and the acceptance or rejection of a paper. Much less attention is given to question of equity in the process and procedures that lead to an editorial decision. This survey of journal editors reports data on several neglected procedural areas that may affect objective editorial judgments: “sponsored submissions,” “inside track submissions,” and back region communication. The findings suggest that editors are confronted by or involved in these procedural issues with some regularity. While additional empirical work is needed in these areas, the descriptive data we present help us to raise several critical issues and to begin a long overdue discussion of their ethical dimensions.

Nuclear Foes Fault Scientific American 's Editorial Judgment in Publishing a Recent Article by Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe

Nuclear Foes Fault <i>Scientific American</i> 's Editorial Judgment in Publishing a Recent Article by Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe

Use of an interactive program in analyzing data for a dialect dictionary

THE Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will be the official dictionary of the American Dialect Society, which was founded in 1889 in the hope of someday producing a dictionary which would be the American equivalent of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. Not until recent years has it been possible to collect and process enough data to produce DARE, but during the past eighty-six years collection has been going on with a view to eventual publication. Now that funds and computers are available, we expect within a very few years to have the dictionary published by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Some examples of the sorts of entries to appear in the dictionary will characterize its distinctness from more conventional dictionaries of standard lexicons. Having searched through a large body of written material and written collections of oral data, we have collected a huge corpus of contemporary speech: words, expressions, grammatical forms, and pronunciations which are local or regional, rather than general, in the United States. Some words which have less than national currency, for example, are rack for a coat hanger in North Carolina, chunk meaning "to throw" in South Carolina, and beau-dollar for a silver dollar, exclusively in the southeast. For a place in the mountains or hills where it is possible to get through without climbing over the top, many people in the northeast who don't say pass say notch; and people in the west who don't say pass say canyon. Pass, the general word, will not be included in the dictionary. Our written data was typed, machine-scanned, and sorted into an alphabetical listing. Our oral data, because of its size, has been treated somewhat differently. In 1002 communities, spread across all 50 stat s and distributed according to the density of the settled population, our fieldworkers interviewed 2752 informants. These people varied in age, sex, race, education, and community type (the distribution of these is shown as Figure 1), but what they had in common was that they were native speakers of English who had lived virtually all of their lives in the areas where we interviewed them. In each community a long Questionair of 1847 questions was filled in by the fieldworkers, who took down the informants' responses to each question (most of them of the form "What do you call such-and-such around here?") with notes and phonetic transcriptions where necessary, for a total of about 2,500,000 responses. Two and a half million responses with an average length of about 20 characters, with all the informant's data tied to each one, will not fit economically in a computer file. We calculated that if we included everything we would need to store 65 million characters. What we have done is to store the words on paper, where we human editors can get at them and make editorial judgments about them, and to store the numbers in a computer file, where the machine can get at them and count them in various ways. The kinds of questions we asked for each response are (a) is it general or limited; (b) if it is not general, does it vary regionally or socially; (c) in what respects does it vary; and (d). how does its distribution compare with the distribution of other responses? Answers to these questions are found on a printout of all the responses to a given question. Two of these appear as Figures 2 and 3. We see that sunrise and sunset are the most

Correspondence of James K. Polk (review)

BOOK REVIEWS349 Correspoiulence of James K. Polk. Volume II, 1833-34. Edited by Herbert Weaver and Paul H. Bergeron. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972. Pp. xxxvi, 645. $15.00.) The first volume of this series was reviewed in the June 1970 number of this journal, and most of my comments regarding editorial method and general usefulness continue to apply. Now for the first time selectivity becomes an important matter. The editors found 850 letters from this period and selected 664 for inclusion—512 in full and 152 in summary . The remainder seemed "too routine and inconsequential." Perhaps so—but the pattern already revealed in Polk's correspondence leaves this editorial judgment somewhat adrift. He was very meticulous about his duties; he apparently kept no letterbooks yet, although he did save incoming envelopes; and he had in Volume I a large number of "routine" exchanges with other government officers. Now that he is Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, "routine" correspondence may derive significance from its very quantity, especially for those probing administrative history. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many of the excluded 186 deal with his committee work, nor even how many of them Polk himself wrote. Excluded items should probably be calendared at the end of each volume, or at least more thoroughly described in the preface. Only forty-four of the letters in this volume are by Polk. And only a handful of them reveal much about his own political views and plans. Several written to House colleague Cave Johnson during the summer recess of 1833, when Polk was up for reelection, are significant, as are four more in the summer of 1834 (to Jackson and others), and two to James Walker, brother-in-law and political confidant, at Christmas. Polk thus plays the title role from the shadows, while being addressed by the other actors. And the stage is crowded and cacophonous. Through the din, which is by turns flowery, cryptic, and ungrammatical , comes one constant refrain: The Bank is Beelzebub! Out with the deposits! Down with the Bank! One can detect other political leit-motifs. Arkansas Territory, soon to be a state, must not send Bank-men to the Senate. The press, particularly in Nashville, must be rescued from Bank control. The Tennessee Constitutional Convention of 1834 must be kept in friendly hands. The party must not be split by putting up Hugh Lawson White in competition with Van Buren for the 1836 presidential canvass. John Bell, elected Speaker over Polk with Whig assistance though nominally a Jackson man, must be carefully watched. This volume is more heavily political, and more politically useful, than the first; but it also contains the usual family letters, pension requests , complaints about mail service, pleas for patronage, and gossipy reports from Maury County. A misspelled request datelined "Ultima Thule, Sevier Co., Arkansas Territory" typifies the rural Jacksonian's view of a congressman's duties: "I would be glad to hear from you & 350civil war history if you have any public documts that you think I would like to see pleose send them. I like to read anything against the Damd Bank." Aspiring soldier William H. Stephens urged, "Exercise half the zeal for me that I did distributing Circulars for you, and I can go to West Point." Aspiring poet Robert Mack wanted Polk to peddle to fellow congressmen a volume of his poems including an "irregular Ode" describing Napoleon 's battle of Marengo. Aspiring politician and lover Terry Cahal concluded a long political letter, "I am out as a beau about the 27th time & am actually courting two girls at this very time. . . . Marriage should be effected in a business like style upon reflection and not perpetrated in a passion." Aspiring student Williamson Haggard (term paper hucksters take note) asked Polk to compose him a "tolerable lengthy" speech against nullification, to be read at an "exhibition." In addition to these lighter bits there is a series of letters from a plantation overseer, illustrating well the travails of working for an absentee landlord. Totally absent are the crank letters we would expect in a modern statesman's papers, or even many letters of reasoned criticism, which is...

Diseases of the Kidney

For eight long years the children of Homer Smith have been wandering, waiting for the second edition of Strauss and Welt, and now we are rewarded; but a few grains of sand are mixed with the milk and honey. This two-volume encylopedia of nephrology is relentlessly detailed and reads at times as though translated from German. Several new chapters on specific uremic problems, transplant, and chronic dialysis have been added, which is as it should be. Some of the old chapters, however, are not as they should be. For example, an unchanged description of ultrastructure in these days of molecular anatomy is a serious error of editorial judgment. The crucial and enigmatic question of glomerular pores deserves sophisticated discussion. Again, a modern chapter on renal roentgenography should describe new techniques of visualization, including the use of isotopes, for those problems which involve poor kidney function. Individual authors' quirks inevitably appear,

Clinical Nephrology

Nephrology books, like sweaters, come in three sizes, small, medium, and large. Dr. Papper's book is medium. Its 539 well-printed pages represent a reasonable summary of current concepts in nephrology. The illustrations are quite good, particularly the drawings by Obaya. Each chapter is provided with a reading list which is brief and helpful. We can share the author's amusement with the "all purpose urinalysis" which is the familiar laboratory report of a little bit of protein and a few white cells in everybody's urine. Renal services have long ago learned the necessity of looking at their patients' urines themselves. The list of preventable and treatable renal diseases is a welcome reminder of how much we can do for our patients if we break through the aura of defeatism that surrounds renal failure. Dr. Papper's editorial judgment is good—he deals with controversy fairly and briefly. The book has its problems. It

Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" and Mencken's "Best Editorial Judgment"

Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" and Mencken's "Best Editorial Judgment"

Improving manuscript evaluation procedures.

THE chronic discontent of both journal editors and contributors of articles with existing procedures for evaluating scientific papers is well documented. Convention program committees face a similar problem in selecting papers for presentation (McReynolds, 1971), although the published complaints usually focus exclusively on frustrations encountered in dealings with the journals. Rodman (1970), writing from the perspective of the journal editor, described the heavy responsibility of the gatekeeper role. In his term as editor of Social Problems, Rodman rejected about onefourth of the manuscripts received without passing them on to referees. Among those passed on to reviewers, if two referees read the same paper, they frequently disagreed on its merit. Moreover, when manuscripts were rejected, considerable time and energy were expended in cooling out the irate authors who questioned editorial judgment. The pressures generated for the editor are evident by Rodman's view of the job.

A Letter To the Editor

Professor Robert Hay rebuts the editorial judgment of John Alderson's research report in the Spring issue of the Journal and in his turn questions the editor's understanding of an effective letter. George Douglas then clarifies his earlier statements and reiterates some of his criticisms.

Citation indexing and evaluation of scientific papers.

Citation indexing and evaluation of scientific papers.

Household Hints: The Rockefeller Report

The report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., published as The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (McGraw-Hill, 1965), is the product of two years’ labor by a committee. The report's porridge-like prose shows that each member of the committee exercised some editorial judgment. Yet the document is distinguished for its effort to reach beyond diagnosis toward some prescriptions.The assessment of the theatre's current economic situation offered by the report is predictable: “ … no one expects Broadway to collapse. … But Broadway as we knew it … is being challenged, its audiences are turning elsewhere.” According to the Rockefeller report, the theatre's future lies outside New York, with non-profit professional groups. The report further concludes that “the non-profit performing arts should not be expected to pay their way at the box-office.”

5-Fluorouracil-Reply

I am pleased to acknowledge Dr. Morris' letter questioning our editorial scanning. It should be noted for the record that I review each manuscript upon its receipt in this office. It is then sent out by a member of the staff for review to one or more experts. I sit in final judgment for rejection, acceptance, or revision. I do not believe there is any laxity in editorial industry. Editorial judgment, however, is something for each reader to decide.

The Flavonoids in Biology and Medicine.

This critical review by Shils and Goodhart should put a stop to a great deal of the unhappy confusion which has prevailed in our understanding of blood coagulation and vascular inadequacy in conditions where nutritional factors are supposed to have a role. Ever since Szent-Györgi suggested the possibility of flavonoids having some essential biological function in mammalian physiology, in 1936, there have been discordant reports, many of which are magnificent examples of the ease with which observers are distracted by uncontrolled experiments, particularly when these are superimposed on very extensive clinical ignorance. In all the vast pile of papers written in this field there is small residue of useful clinical information. We obviously need such critical reviews as this wellwritten and well-organized one. It is a sad reflection on the editorial judgment of the last 20 years to see how much space in respectable journals has been taken by studies

Treatment in General Practice.

Here in book form is the therapeutic index or scrap book that every general practitioner wishes he could prepare and keep for himself. The author has apparently stored in envelops, on cards or by some other indexing method references to most of the important articles on therapeutics that have appeared in medical publications in recent years. He has carefully abstracted and condensed this material and he has used sound editorial judgment in his choice of suggestions that are most worth while. The result is a book on therapeutics that is probably the most practical large book at present available. It is arranged according to diseases of infectious and parasitic causation, allergic disturbances and diseases of the various systems of the body. It includes also intoxications, a special section on burns, obstetrics and a number of miscellaneous subjects. The material is in practical form for immediate application at the bedside. As