I became editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space about four years ago, initially shadowing Gerry Pratt for a few months, then taking on new submissions, and formally taking over as editor at the beginning of 2007.

In calendar year 2007, there were 132 submissions; in 2008, 157; in 2009, 176. To date in 2010 there have been 125, so if previous trends continue we are expecting over 200 papers this year.

The first volume of the journal, in 1983, had four issues, and a total of 500 pages. Each issue had four to six articles, with editorials and reviews making up the balance. With volume 10, 1992, the journal expanded to six issues a year, but kept the pages per issue the same. Until volume 21 (2003) the total number of pages remained around 780. The number of pages per issue rose to 158 and 948 for the year for volumes 22-24.

In 2007, with volume 25, the journal increased to 190 pages per issue; 1140 per volume. I now work on the basis of around nine full papers an issue, with commentaries, review essays and reviews alongside them. Very roughly we think there are 600-50 words to a page, so for text-only articles, that’s roughly 120,000 words per issue – basically a fairly substantial edited book every two months.

This means we now publish around 55 articles a year. Very roughly, about one third of papers never go to review – all papers are pre-screened by myself and the four co-editors. Of those that go to review, just over one third eventually get accepted, but usually with one or two rounds of revision.

Given the changing number of issues and pages, it’s difficult to know quickly how many papers the journal has published in total, without counting them all individually, but my guess is something like 900 papers over 28 years.

I’ve been thinking these through not just as current editor, but as the projected managing editor of a collection of volumes highlighting some of the best work in the four Environment and Planning journals. I’ll also be editor of at least one of the volumes: for that I need to select 20 papers from Society and Space.