Review of Finance

The Review of Finance is the Journal of the European Finance Association. The aim of the Review of Finance is to publish the very best research in financial economics, irrespective of research methodology, author identity, geography, or whether the findings support existing research or are seen as controversial. In particular, the editors are willing to take risks on papers that may not typically be published by good journals. At the same time, the journal aims to be a resource for the world community of finance researchers, open to exciting and novel contributions from authors around the globe. The board is committed to a fast, electronically managed, editorial process.

The Managing Editor’s Report for 2021/2 is available here.

Some highlights include:

The 2-year impact factor rose to 5.059 in 2021. This compares to 3.894 in 2020, 2.885 in 2019 and 1.906 in 2018, indicating strong forward momentum.
Excluding self-citations, the impact factor has increased to 4.971, from 3.840 in 2020.
The 5-year impact factor has increased from 4.653 in 2020 to 5.071.
The number of submissions reached a record of 1,012, up from 978 in 2020-21.
At the start of 2017, we announced strict top-three standards, a stringent desk-rejection policy and an increase in submission fees to reduce the number of left-tail submissions (and allow us to start paying referees). Submissions indeed dropped from 923 in 2016/7 to 704 in 2018/9. 2021/2 is the second sucessive year that the RF exceeded the highest pre-2017 submission figures.
The acceptance rate is 7.88%, a significant increase from 4.66% last year and a testament to the increasingly-high quality of submissions. In total, 70 papers were accepted (rising from 40 in 2020-21) and 79 papers received R&Rs (rising from 72 last year).
In 2021-22, we published six issues, containing 44 papers in total. This included a Special Issue on China, published in May 2022, containing 8 papers.
The mean turnaround time fell very slightly from 44 to 43 days, and the median fell from 32 to 30.
One new metric that we have started to track is the regional breakdown of accepted papers. The proportion of papers from Asian authors rose from 2% in 2018/19 to 16% in 2020/21, and to 20% in 2021/22. For a paper with n coauthors, this calculation attributes 1/n papers to each author. For example, a paper with 2 US and 1 Asian author counts as 1/3 of a paper coauthored by an Asian author.