I reviewed approximately 1,000 manuscripts for The C Users Journal last year. This year I expect to review at least that many — probably more. A little arithmetic tells you that I spent a serious amount of time performing this very necessary function. In some ways, it is the most draining — and most important — part of my job as Senior Editor.A little more arithmetic tells you that we have to turn down a lot of offerings. We have room for upwards of 100 articles per year, tops. That means we can only accept about ten per cent of the articles sent our way. Like it or not, I occasionally must turn down a submission that I'd really like to run simply because we've exhausted all the space we can spare for that topic.
Nevertheless, some needs still go unfulfilled. Which ones? I can't tell you exactly.
We solicit most of our material by running one or more Calls for Papers in each issue. These describe the themes for upcoming issues, hopefully with enough lead time for potential contributors to respond. As I indicated above, that hope is fulfilled, statistically at least, because we get lots of responses.
What we haven't done, however, is invite articles on non-theme topics. Those are all the topics we can't enumerate. Sometimes we can't even imagine what they are until someone hits us over the head with a good piece of writing. So I'm here to invite an occasional hit on the head.
Do you have an idea for an article that you think might help other C or C++ programmers? If so, don't wait for a more-or-less appropriate theme article to roll around. Send it in. Uses for C and C++ are growing too rapidly to enumerate, particularly in a mere twelve categories.
And don't be daunted by the statistics I cited above. We run nearly all the articles I'd like to accept. I expect the acceptance rate to be even better for underworked topics. Use your imagination, and we may very well use your words.
P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.uunet