THE EDITOR'S COLUMN.

In this issue, considerable space is devoted to discussion of the content and practices of other journals in sociology. A review symposium covers three volumes of the "American Sociological Review" the "American Journal of Sociology" and "Social Forces"-one of the contributions being focused on the review process used by those journals. Another symposium reviews a book which deals primarily with the review process used by journals in sociology, social work and psychology. The established procedure for evaluating manuscripts perhaps could work rather well when submissions were fewer and when almost all of the refereeing was done by members of editorial boards. At one time, each editor was usually fairly well acquainted with the work and qualifications of the referees. The official status of the editorial board members and their personal relationship with the editor imposed a kind of accountability. Each editor usually made decisions on only a few dozen papers each year and thus could devote a great deal of time and attention to each decision. He could read each paper and each critique of it very carefully and thus could detect at least a fair amount of any careless or incompetent work by referees.