Editorial

Submission rates at Ecological Monographs have been increasing for the last three years; they are up 12% from 2017 and 33% from 2016. We are receiving more varied and cross‐cutting manuscripts than ever before and the quality of these manuscripts is reflected by an increase in our acceptance rate – we accepted 30% of the manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs this past year, up from 21% in 2017. We received submissions with authors from 42 countries in 2017, and from 52 countries in 2018, a number we'd like to see continue to increase. By far, most authors are from the US (34%) with China (13%) and Australia (9%) following. As a group, Europeans account for 29% of authors in 2018. We realize the quality of our journal is contingent on the quality of the manuscripts submitted. Many thanks to the authors who submit to Ecological Monographs; we know the time and effort it takes to produce excellent scientific work and your manuscripts enable our journal to tell diverse and multifaceted scientific stories. The 38 manuscripts published in Ecological Monographs in 2018 are varied and included topics exploring migrating song birds, city biodiversity, nutrient limitation of tropical soil microbes, using herbaria to answer global change questions, upscaling biodiversity estimates, as well as a review of Bayesian approaches for predictive inference. We published 26 traditional Articles, five Concepts and Synthesis papers, and seven Review papers. We continue to encourage synthetic and cross‐disciplinary submissions that need space to explore new and emerging ideas in observational, quantitative and applied ecology. Please contact us if you have ideas for manuscripts, reviews, or concepts and synthesis papers; we are also keen to work with authors interested in across‐journal online virtual issues on current topics. Ecological Monographs continues to be one of the top ranked journals in Ecology and the papers we publish have a lasting impact on science. In 2018, it was ranked seventh among ISI's “Ecology” journals, and our papers continue to have a citation “half‐life” of greater than ten years. After editorial review, about half of the manuscripts received were sent out for external peer review. The average time to a first decision for reviewed manuscripts was 79 days, similar to both 2016 and 2017. Our average time from acceptance to publication is 90 days, 13% faster than in 2017 and 31% faster than in 2016. On average, we have to send requests to 5.0 reviewers to get two people to review one of our manuscripts (thank you reviewers!) a slightly higher