Abstract: Publishing an article in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Faith and Scholarship involves a process of which many people are not aware. I’m sure it is obvious to all that articles don’t just spring from the mind of an author and onto the printed page. In this essay I draw back the curtain just a bit to give readers a glimpse and, hopefully, an understanding of the process.

Over a decade ago, in August 2012, I was at the annual FAIR Conference. As has been normal at every such conference except one, Dan Peterson was the concluding speaker. As he finished his remarks, he announced the launch of the Interpreter journal. It was on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, that the journal’s first article was published. The second article was published ten days later, on Friday, August 10.

Almost four years later, in April 2016, I joined The Interpreter Foundation and took the reins of the journal. This is a position I have handled for over the past seven years. There have been almost 600 weeks since the first article was published in Interpreter, and we haven’t missed a single one of those weeks. This record can be viewed, by some, as a matter of pride. I don’t view it as pride, so much, but as a matter of consistency and dependability. Over the past 11 years our readership has come to expect at least one article every Friday, and so far we’ve delivered on that expectation.

This article — the one you are reading right now — is the 747th article published in Interpreter. Last week’s article was the final one for Volume 59 of Interpreter, and this article will appear as the Introduction of that volume. In recognition of completing 59 volumes and such a prodigious number of articles, I thought it profitable and, perhaps, interesting to share a few more statistics and pull back the curtain just a bit to give an idea of what it takes to bring an article to publication.

[Page viii]A Few Statistics

In our 59 volumes we have published over 18,800 pages from 212 primary authors. (Several dozen secondary co-authors are not included in that author count. Most authors have written only a single article (127 authors), but some have written many more. Dan Peterson is the most-credited author, with 60 articles. This makes sense, since he has written the introduction essays for most of our 59 volumes. A close second is Matt Bowen (59 articles), followed by Jeff Lindsay (24) and Brant Gardner (24). That leaves 580 articles published by the remaining 208 primary authors.1

Based on the best information available, our three most popular articles (the “top three”)2 are the following:

* Christopher J. Blythe, “Vaughn J. Featherstone’s Atlanta Temple Letter,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 37 (2020): 309–18, https://interpreterfoundation.org/vaughn-j-featherstones-atlanta-temple-letter/

* Terryl L. Givens, “Letter to a Doubter,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4 (2013): 131–46, htt...