Editor's Corner
One of the duties of an editor of an SAA publication is to prepare a
bi-annual report for the Board of Directors. I confess that, at times, I have
envied my fellow journal editors, because their reports often contain tables of
data that speak to rates of submission, acceptance, and rejection, or the
length of the review process, or some other somehow more tangible level of
accounting. In contrast, my Bulletin reports have been narratives about
the initiation of new columns or features, appointment of associate editors, or
other necessary, but more mundane, aspects of Bulletin production. My
long interest in the analysis of quantitative data in archaeology exacerbates
this perception of mine. And while I am aware that this envy is misplaced, and
that an overreliance on numbers without thinking about their meaning is often
the path to perdition, I nevertheless have persisted in my desire to have a
quantitative measure of Bulletin content. The results of this effort are
presented in summary form on page 19. As you will see, I have classified the
content of the Bulletin from 1994 through 1997 into a number of
categories and counted the numbers of pages devoted to each of them. These
counts, expressed as percentages of the volume devoted to a topic, reveal a
number of interesting patterns about our publishing priorities, and are
compared to a series of priorities for Bulletin content I set for myself
when I took over as editor. Although I suppose these can be seen as
self-fulfilling (or self-serving) prophecies, the patterns are interesting, and
I hope you will get as much out of reviewing them as I did in generating them.