In its original form, and throughout its first sixteen volumes, the Review was published out of the English department at the University of Georgia and edited by James Everett Kibler.  During this time, the journal appeared twice a year, with the two issues forming a single annual volume.  From issue seventeen forward, the Review was produced out of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, with the editor voted in by the Simms Society Executive Council.  In the latter iteration, the journal appeared once a year in a double-issue format, still with a single annual volume.  During Kibler’s time as editor, the Review served as an omnibus publication of the Simms Society, effectively joining the functions of an academic journal and a Society newsletter.  Scholarly pieces were set alongside membership news, notes, and announcements.  Modern volumes of the journal, though, are more single-mindedly academic in concentration.  Submissions are blind peer-reviewed, elements of non-scholarly focus are relegated to the newly-devised Simms Society News newsletter, and the publication of the journal is effected by professional printing houses.  In both its original and modern formats, The Simms Review has been the primary venue for making newly-discovered or otherwise little-known works by the author available to the larger academic community.

          Because the journal has as its primary audience the members of the Simms Society, its circulation has traditionally been somewhat limited.  Scholars wanting to access its contents either needed to be within reach of one of the handful of libraries that owned a subscription or be members of the Society.  While information about the contents of the modern editions is discoverable through popular databases like the Modern Language Association Bibliography, overall the materials have not been as widely accessible as they should be, given the journal’s position as the largest major repository of academic writing on Simms.  With the Simms Initiatives digitization of the full run of the journal, the study of Simms can now be more robustly informed by the full range of investigation into the author’s thought.  All academic work to follow can be more fully representative of the current state of scholarship on Simms and his canon.