Abstract
We are very pleased to be the new Editorial Team for Sociology. We took over in January 2013 and have already seen through three very successful and high profile issues, including a new record for the number of downloads for a single paper. We look forward to building on all the achievements and innovations that we have been fortunate to inherit from the Cardiff-based Editorial Team – thank you all! – as well as previous Editors of Sociology.
We are very aware that we are taking on a highly successful journal. Sociology is the flagship journal of the BSA and one of the two key journals for sociological research in the UK. It has an expanding international readership in other European countries and North America as well as in Asia. It has an increasingly strong ISI Impact Factor and in 2011 Sociology was ranked at 29/138 journals in the sociology discipline (Thompson Reuters 2012). In an expanding field, Sociology’s position in the top 30 is impressive. The journal maintains a strong track record of attracting both new and established authors; it presents a good balance of theoretical and empirical articles and covers contemporary areas and issues of analysis as well as keeping classic sociological figures in view. Although articles tend towards a more qualitative approach there is certainly no methods preference in the journal; many articles draw on a mixed and plural method tradition. Other important features include book symposia, the extended book review section and the annual special issue system.
Our Vision for Sociology
Our vision for the journal is to sustain and build on the best of these well-established traditions. As the new Editors, our main aims are to:
Extend and develop Sociology’s international reach and appeal
Increase Sociology’s impact factor
Actively encourage and extend high quality dialogue and diverse, interdisciplinary debate within Sociology, and
Develop Sociology’s online presence and features.
We recognize that editorial proposals take some time to be ‘realized’ in the pages of the journal but we are happy to be already working with our publishers Sage in speeding up Online First publication of articles, in developing podcasts linked to journal content and in the production of e-special issues.
Internationalizing the Journal
Sociology is the first and main journal of the BSA. Like the journals of other national sociological associations, it is likely to retain a bias towards the publication of papers by sociologists based in the UK. However, the well-known challenges of ‘methodological nationalism’ as well as the globalizations and transnationalism of sociology as a discipline mean it is important to find ways of enhancing the journal’s international reach and significance.
Currently Sociology publishes a relatively limited amount of work from sociologists based outside the UK. The recent special issues on the 2012 Olympics, on Human Rights and Genetics and on the Economic Crisis are notable as themes that incorporate and take account of debates beyond the UK. Where possible, we will work with the Editorial Board to seek and support special issues that lend themselves to the submission of papers from outside the UK.
Our objective is for Sociology to respond to, and develop, a stronger identity in the international environment. Our key proposal for internationalizing the journal is to encourage dialogue between and across ‘national’ sociologies. This will be encouraged through developing much closer links between key sociology conferences, such as the BSA, the ASA and the ISA, and Sociology. For example, we are also exploring the possibility of developing a Sociology lecture at international conferences and we will seek to solicit keynote addresses to the BSA Annual Conference for the journal from academics outside the UK. Another option will involve us liaising with the organizers of the BSA Annual Conference, or Study Group events, to consider ways of staging debates on particular themes in sociology in national and international contexts as a route to their publication in Sociology. In all of these initiatives encouragement will be given to authors to reflect on the challenges of what the ‘British’ component in the BSA means in current sociological landscapes.
To attend to the international range of the journal and to extend the relevance and ‘readability’ of Sociology articles to audiences beyond the UK, we will, as Editors, also encourage authors to submit and/or revise their papers so as to incorporate wherever appropriate the international, transnational and comparative implications of their work. International articles, like UK ones, will be encouraged to incorporate reflections on the ways in which authors’ findings and arguments connect to current sociological concerns and the extent to which national framings are or are not helpful. We welcome the support of reviewers for the journal in developing these aims.
Increasing the Impact Factor of Sociology
Our commitment to raising Sociology’s current placing in the ISI rankings is not simply an uncritical, ‘ratings’ driven agenda. Although citation indices and metrics have an obvious value in the current REF exercises and in the broader research audit culture, our core editorial aim is to maintain and seek ways of enhancing Sociology as a high quality, open and accessible journal. That said, raising the ISI ranking of Sociology would benefit the journal’s standing, profile and recognized quality within the sociology discipline.
In that context we set a goal of raising the ranking as an explicit target. Some of the ideas set out above will enhance this aim – the less parochial and nationally bound a journal the wider the sociology readership and the related citations are likely to be. Directly raising the profile of the journal through its publication of key articles and authors is another route to ensuring a greater audience and citation interaction. Targeting and approaching established and emergent sociologists to encourage submission of their work to the journal is a process that we have already started. Like all submissions to the journal they will, of course, undergo the usual peer review process. We also intend to increase Sociology’s online visibility and features and these too may impact on audience engagement and subsequent citation rates.
Developing the Reviews Section
We welcome the innovations of the review section initiated by the Cardiff team. In particular, a more focused book review section is, we believe, of real benefit to readers in an environment where the sheer number of publications is increasing. We also think this section offers ways of internationalizing Sociology by commissioning reviews of key sociology texts from outside the UK.
With these commitments in mind we aim to do the following:
Maintain and develop book symposia: this makes it possible to have a number of invited reviewers reflect on some of the most exciting, provocative or compelling sociologically relevant work as it emerges. The symposium format provides an engaging and rich set of accounts variously evaluating theoretical work and research findings, and the state of the debate on a key issue, and looking to the wider questions it raises.
Maintain and develop book review essays: having a comparative reviewer engagement with several books on the same/similar sociological topic works well and enables Sociology to identify and reflect on new (and returning) trends, clusters and themes in sociological research and publications.
Continue to have individual book reviews, which are not only of inherent interest and value to Sociology audiences but also represent a useful opportunity for newer and less experienced sociologists to ‘cut their teeth’ in publications.
Introduce a Post-Publication ‘Reflections’ Section
In our view, the reflections published in response to the article by Mike Savage and Roger Burrows (2007) on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ provides an excellent model on which to develop more debate within and across the papers published in the journal. The recent article by Savage et al. (2013) on ‘A New Model of Social Class’ provides a similar possibility for developing responses and argument. With post-publication reflections we will seek ways to keep work ‘live’ and generate related, but new, deliberations within Sociology. We realize, however, that successive debates in the pages of the journal can be somewhat slow and we will develop the online environment as a means of enabling timely discussion.
Sociology Online
We are committed to working with Sage to develop Sociology’s online presence. The move to prepublication of articles online before paper publication has had a significant impact on narrowing the gap between the acceptance and the availability of an article. Importantly, it also lessens the REF pressures on authors publishing in the journal. Online First publishing means that as an Editorial Team we now have some flexibility in selecting the articles for each issue. While we do not want to disrupt the chronological fairness of maintaining the place of articles in the queue, Online First provides some editorial leeway in deciding on article selection and light touch theming if we see opportunities for it. Signs of this are evident in the issues that we have been responsible for thus far.
We are committed to developing Sociology’s website with the BSA, the wider Editorial Board and through Sage. The journal’s wider online environment offers a highly flexible space for journal-related debate, innovation and commentary. We will continue to support the development of e-Special Sociology issues whereby a small editorial team, drawn from volunteer members of the journal’s Editorial Board, identify a sociological theme and then bring together a selection of past Sociology articles selected from Sociology’s archives. To date there have been two successful e-Special issues – one on methods and one on race. In another online development we have set up an Editor meets the author podcast interview for each issue: Sophie Watson’s interview with Loïc Wacquant is now on the journal’s web page and other interviews will follow. We see this as an opportunity to engage with established as well as new and career-young authors to discuss the work they have published in the journal.
We will continue the tradition of producing an annual report on submissions to the journal and aim at least to maintain the current excellent average turnaround times for returning decisions on papers, something for which we rely on the expertise and commitment of the Editorial Board and Associate Board members.
We hope that this introduction to us as Editors gives you a good sense of how we envisage spending our time as the Sociology Editorial Team. We hope too that you will welcome these plans and continue to enjoy and be excited by the journal’s contributions to the discipline of sociology.