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[this_is_my_username]

Could it not result in the opposite effect, that with so many submissions journals can raise the bar?

Why would a flood of sub-par submissions "raise the bar" over the current level? My gut feeling is that the percentage of accepted submissions will drop for some journals, but the quality of what is published will remain the same.

 I suppose it ultimately depends on the editors and reviewers who must be getting swamped with all sorts of stuff. I don't envy their headaches.

[watermarkup]

Told ya so: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,64222.msg1415012.html

My understanding is that the number of scholarly journals (at least in the humanities) is growing, while the number of presses is sinking fast. So there are more peer-reviewed outlets for articles, while people in book fields are screwed.

[fedscholar]

Good advice Mad_Doc,

Now, what the hell am I doing farting around on this blog? Hehe...I will agree that it seems to be at least 40-50% below normal, and considerably worse than that in some areas hit by the mortgage meltdown (California). Well, there's always next year.....

[watermarkup]

There's something screwy with the MLA's numbers. The Inside Higher Ed and the NY Times articles (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/education/18professor.html) both give the percentages for the foreign languages as "Spanish (35.5 percent), French (16.0 percent), Chinese (9.5 percent), German (4.0 percent), Arabic (3.0 percent) and Italian (2.0 percent)." Now, Chinese is having a very good year, but it's not that good.

If you search on the ADFL job information list for these languages (combining "Spanish" with "Latin American" and "French" with "Francophone Studies," and adding "all dates" [=current] and "only expired listings"), you find, for all academic ranks combined, the following:

Spanish/LatAm   259
French/Franc     112
Gmc/Scand         60
Chinese              50
Italian                30
Arabic                28

According to MLA, these languages represent 70% of all their jobs (add up the percentages above). So if you divide the number of jobs by the total of just these six languages and multiply by .7, you should get more or less what the MLA suggests...but you don't. Instead, you get

Spanish/LatAm   33.6%
French/Franc     14.5%
Gmc/Scand         7.8%
Chinese              6.5%
Italian                3.9%
Arabic                3.6%

The numbers are close enough to the MLA's that I suspect I'm not completely off here, but it looks like MLA is reporting significantly lower percentages for Germanic/Scandinavian than the posted jobs indicate, and over-stating the numbers for Chinese.

Now there are some caveats, most notably that searching the ADFL list by "all ranks" picks up some oddball postdocs and weird international positions that get duplicated in many languages, so these numbers aren't perfect by any means. But if you look, for example, only at assistant professor-rank, which should eliminate some of that effect, you still find:

Spanish/LatAm   198
French/Franc       79
Gmc/Scand          32
Chinese               30
Arabic                 19
Italian                 14

In other words, I suspect that the Big 3 have not been rearranged quite yet.