Appendix A: Historical Foreign Relations Timeliness and Production Charts

This chart illustrates annualized data for the production and timeliness of the Foreign Relations series. While the chart reflects the entire history of the series, you can use the dynamic range selector to focus upon a more specific period.

“Annual FRUS Production,” displayed in red, reports the number of volumes released during each calendar year. Both of the “Lag” datasets, displayed in blue, report three values: the solid line illustrates the average lag for all the volumes published in a given year and the shaded region above and below this line (if present) shows the range of the lowest and highest lags for volumes produced that year. The lag for a volume is the number of years elapsed between the creation of the latest document that it contains and the publication of the volume. Beginning in the 1930s, many special retrospective and supplemental volumes, designed to address lacunae in earlier volumes’ coverage of significant documentation, have been produced as part of the Foreign Relations series. Conversely, since the 1940s, special accelerated volumes on selected topics have also been published. Both types of these “special” volumes manifest different production challenges than those involved with “regular” volumes and, to facilitate more precise tracking of the evolving lag of “regular” volumes, they have been excluded from the “Average Regular FRUS Lag” dataset.