Abstract
This is our first report as the Editors of Sociology. We have very much enjoyed our first year as Editors. The journal has had a busy year in 2013 and we are pleased to see that some of our initiatives are becoming visible as we report below. We again place on record our thanks to the previous Editorial Team from Cardiff University. We hope we have sustained and built on their legacy. We are following their model of an annual Editors’ Report to outline developments in the journal and improve transparency in the peer-review process, including submission numbers, acceptance rates and article processing times. This report appears slightly later in the year than in the past because we wanted to base our report on full year statistics.
The Cardiff team left us a stock of articles and reviews that provided space to deal with the papers that have come in over the past year. One element of that was the publication at the start of the year of a previously unpublished speech by Pierre Bourdieu in 1993. They also initiated the process that led to the publication of the Great British Class Survey article by Mike Savage et al. The wide coverage this received led to the article being downloaded an astonishing 19,000 times in the first month.
Statistical Overview
The journal statistics for 2013 indicate that Sociology remains in a strong and healthy position in a number of respects. Submissions to the journal in 2013 went up to 274 from 248 in 2012. The overall year-on-year pattern is of rising submissions, with the exceptional figure in 2011 due largely to the volume of submissions received for the human rights special issue (Table 1).
Number of articles submitted by month 2009–2013.
Note: This table includes only original article submissions. Revisions are not included. This table does not include any type of content (book reviews, research notes, etc.) other than articles.
This steady rise in original submissions – up by over 10 per cent in 2013 – has increased the workload of our Editorial Board, Associate Board and other non-Board reviewers; we thank them for their contribution to the peer-review process. We are also grateful to Malcolm Williams who joined the board as a co-opted member in 2013 to cover a colleague on maternity leave. A new Associate Board was selected in 2013 – we saw it as a marker of Sociology’s profile that 240 applications were received for the 24 places available.
As Editors, we are heavily reliant on the quality of the anonymous peer-review process to determine whether or not an article gets accepted for publication. In a minority of cases, however, we have continued to use the ‘immediate [or desk] reject’ option, where a paper is not sent out for peer review. We give authors editorial feedback on why the article is not suitable for consideration by the journal. The reasons vary considerably, but the most common ones are that a paper has little sociological content, or is far too specialised for Sociology and should be considered by another journal (Table 2 breaks down the decisions made in 2012 and 2013).
Decisions made in 2012 and 2013.
Note: The information in this table is based on decisions made in 2012 and 2013 on articles. The articles on which the decisions were made were not necessarily submitted in the same year. Book reviews and articles are not included in the above table. Revisions are included in this table.
We think the peer-review process of the journal is operating fairly as well as efficiently. Our reviewers consistently provide high quality and constructive reports on submissions which we are confident do impact on the quality of the papers we eventually publish. We are pleased to have maintained the journal’s impressive turnaround times for decisions. Similar to last year, the average time from submission to first decision is 64 days (see Table 3). Turning around manuscripts in around two months is an achievement the journal can be proud of and one we will seek to maintain. We have also significantly reduced the backlog of papers where a first decision has taken over 100 days. Given the volume of submissions, it is to be expected that only a small proportion of the papers submitted will be accepted for publication.
Average time from submission to first decision.
Note: The information in this table is based only on articles.
Authors often ask how long it will take before an accepted paper will be published so we are happy to report that the gap between acceptance and publication on Online First has come down to five months on average, and four months since the second half of 2013 (from seven months in 2012); though publication in an issue from acceptance rose to 13 months (from 10 months in 2012). We acknowledge that these achievements also rely on the hard work of the BSA publications office and the staff at SAGE.
Sociology also continues to occupy a healthy top quartile ranking in the field of sociology and in 2013 the journal’s impact factor rose to 1.504, placing it 28 out of 137 journals in the Sociology Journal Citation Reports. 1
Developing Sociology
We have worked over the past year to develop Sociology’s profile through various activities. This includes an initiative with our Editorial Board to host a session at the 2013 BSA annual conference with the joint winners of the SAGE prize, Henry Yeomans and Carol Smart. A videocast of the event is available at: http://soc.sagepub.com/site/Videos/Videos.xhtml. We look forward to this event happening again at the BSA annual general conference in Leeds for the 2013 SAGE prize winner(s). As well as such events, we are exploring other ways of strengthening the links between the journal and the BSA’s annual conference, and through our attendance there we also encourage some paper givers to submit to Sociology.
We also welcomed and supported the work of Editorial Board members in producing two ‘e-special’ issues of Sociology on:
Exploring Trends and Challenges in Sociological Research, by Louise Ryan and Linda McKie
Race Ends Where? Race, Racism and Contemporary Sociology, by Nasar Meer and Anoop Nayak.
The e-special issues are an innovative way of excavating past Sociology articles and bringing them together in collections which first, make a new contribution to current debates on methods and on race, and second, showcase the role Sociology plays in publishing some of the best scholarship in particular fields. Both of the e-special issues held well-attended launches with key speakers which again generate conversation and debate. Both of the e-special issues are available online at: http://soc.sagepub.com/site/e-specials/e-specials.xhtml.
While it is important that Sociology is identifiably the journal of the British Sociological Association we are pleased to see that the BSA and SAGE recognise the need to promote Sociology at a variety of conferences to raise its profile and increase submissions from beyond the UK. One of our intentions as the journal’s Editorial Team is to increase the international reach of Sociology and as part of this we plan to promote the journal at the International Sociological Association in Japan. We are also discussing a role for the journal in ‘sponsoring’ a session at the American Sociological Association in 2014 and the European Sociological Association conferences in 2015.
In 2013 around 55 per cent of papers came from UK-based academics; the remaining came from academics and researchers in around 30 other countries. 2 This reflects the increase in international submissions at around 40–45 per cent in recent years and we welcome this trend and see it as reflective of the international profile of Sociology.
When we took over as Editors we promised to develop the journal in a number of ways and we are pleased to report some of these initiatives are coming to fruition. We have seen some results in our efforts to extend the international sensibility of Sociology. Other developments include initiating a series of podcasts based on selected articles from each issue of the journal. The first four are interviews with:
Loic Wacquant on his article on Bourdieu
Fiona Devine talking about the Great British Class Survey
Emma Jackson and Michela Benson on their article on Place-making and Place Maintenance
Christine Hauskeller, one of the Editors of the 2013 special issue on genetics.
Further podcasts have been recorded and will continue to be posted on the journal’s webpage at http://www.soc.sagepub.com.
The extensive coverage of Savage et al.’s class article prompted us to consider how to develop and extend a debate on class in sociology that took us beyond a narrow response format. We are delighted that four authors responded to our request for shorter pieces that develop the debate, which will appear in the June 2014 issue of the journal and, before that, can be found OnlineFirst at: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/early/recent.
We think this ‘spin off conversation’ format will be welcomed by readers and we will consider it for other key papers that the journal publishes in the future. Also in 2014 we look forward to the special issue which explores sociology and the global economic crisis. As Editors we are very excited to have an opportunity to publish our own special issue of the journal which will come out in 2015. We have issued a call for papers for this on the theme of Sociologies of Everyday Life and anticipate a strong response.
We have taken a small step into online-only content of the journal by publishing a response by Stefan Collini to the review symposium on his book What are Universities for? We will also offer this opportunity to other authors in review symposia. Another initiative we expect to see published this year is the first dual-book symposium on two books with related themes. In this way Nira Yuval Davis and Monserrat Guiberneau have reviewed each other’s books about the theme of belonging, along with two other reviewers of each text. We hope this will be seen as a productive and lively new approach to book reviews and it is an idea we are exploring for other books. We see the book reviews section of the journal as an integral part of Sociology and an important space for the exchange and deliberation of ideas, comment and thinking and we will continue to innovate and work on this aspect of the journal.