Each year the EJIL editors read and evaluate hundreds of manuscripts submitted to the journal for possible publication. The vast majority of those submissions, including the manuscripts that are accepted and then published in our pages, come to us, not by invitation, but rather through our online submission system. EJIL commissions only a very small portion of articles published in EJIL – the Foreword article and accompanying Afterwords, occasional Debate Replies (some also come in spontaneously), and the ESIL corner. In addition, EJIL manuscripts are subjected to double-blind peer review, so factors of geography, first language or gender do not influence our peer reviewers. Given these two factors, we believe that the statistics we draw up on an annual basis, notwithstanding their limitations and flaws, provide a picture of the range of authors submitting to and publishing in EJIL. In addition, they may over the years also provide information on changing trends in the who’s who of publishing in EJIL and perhaps more generally in international law scholarship.
That said, our statistics come with a number of caveats. Our submissions database provides only basic, sometimes incomplete data – our information on regional origin is based on professional affiliation rather than nationality, simply because we do not have that information; so too, linguistic origin is determined on the basis of affiliation, which produces awkward results, such as a Chilean author in the US being counted as English-speaking, whilst an Australian author in Germany is counted as non-English-speaking; the database provides information only on the contact author, which means that co-authors are neglected by the system. We manually count all the authors of multi-authored pieces for accepted and published articles, but the volume of manuscripts we receive each year makes it impossible to count all authors for the submissions category.
Here then are the statistics for 2024.
1: Region of Authors’ Affiliation (in percentages of total)
| All Submissions* | Accepted articles** | Published articles** |
Europe (which includes the UK) | 50 | 66 | 66 |
Oceania | 8 | 17 | 12 |
Africa | 3 | 0 | 1 |
Asia | 26 | 6 | 6 |
South America | 2 | 3 | 4 |
North America | 11 | 8 | 11 |
* Number of submissions ** Number of authors
2: Linguistic Origin (in percentages of total)
| All submissions* | Accepted articles** | Published articles** |
English-speaking countries | 21 | 45 | 42 |
Non-English-speaking countries | 79 | 55 | 58 |
* Number of submissions ** Number of authors
3: Gender (in percentages of total)
| All submissions* | Accepted articles** | Published articles** |
Male | 58 | 54 | 55 |
Female | 42 | 46 | 45 |
** Number of authors
Finally, returning to our earlier point that these statistics may offer information over time regarding publishing trends, the chart below tracks the percentages of male and female authors published in EJIL from 2014, when we began to compile statistics, to 2024, the latest statistics available. It would appear, with an occasional blip, that there has been a gradual increase in the percentage of female authors of published EJIL articles.