Abstract
We are very pleased to present the first volume of Politics of our editorship. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together!
Kyle Grayson, Martin Coward, and their team did a fantastic job at getting the journal to its present position. We have inherited an increasingly well-regarded, good quality, accessible journal. Our intention is to consolidate their legacy and push the journal further into being a recognised outlet for excellent scholarship.
Politics works well as a pluralist, generalist journal featuring work from across the fields of politics and international studies. Given the breadth of our own research interests – we do quantitative, qualitative, and critical work on topics as varied as social media analytics, parliamentary procedure, and race theory – we feel strongly that this openness should continue. If you are working on politics, there is a place for your work in Politics.
We want Politics to represent the global profession. That means we’re open to submissions from every part of the world, discussing political issues, institutions, events, and ideas wherever they arise. We are especially interested in receiving more submissions from colleagues based beyond our traditional hinterlands of the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia (though we still want authors from those places, too!) and from historically marginalised or under-represented demographic groups, including women and people of colour. Each submission needs to follow our author guidelines (uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/politics/journal202481#submission-guidelines). Every submission must as a minimum be able to explain: the question it seeks to answer, the concepts underpinning its approach, its original contribution, and its core argument. Make sure you show how what you have done builds on existing research and adds something new. Look at recent examples of articles published in Politics for ideas about how to do both. But if your work meets those criteria, do send it to us – especially if you’re writing about something political or approaching a political question from a perspective not previously seen in our journal.
Politics also works well as a shorter form journal, featuring articles of 4000–8000 words in length. We remain committed to publishing good quality material. But important ideas and strong analyses often come in smaller packages, while the best writing communicates complex concepts while avoiding prolixity.
We want Politics to be also a place for junior colleagues to test out new ideas. We aim to read all submissions within a week, and to desk reject submissions that are not yet ready for peer review. We give written feedback on all desk rejected work, with a view to making your submission better next time around, even if it isn’t quite right for us. While all journal editors are aware that of the impossibility of guaranteeing short review times – reviewers are volunteers with busy day jobs, after all – we do our very best to get specific, constructive advice to all our authors as quickly as possible. Our goal, ultimately, is to publish your good work. But, beyond that, our goal is also to make sure people read your work. When we accept a piece for publication, we ask the author to produce a short post for the journal blog (politicsblog.ac.uk). We use these blog posts to raise awareness of new articles, and to get their key arguments in front of as many potentially interested colleagues as possible – including our nearly 7000 Twitter followers (check us out at @JournalPolitics). If you publish with us, we will help you identify scholars who might want to know what you are working on and get copies of your article in their inboxes and on their ‘to-read’ lists. We have an incentive to do this – journals live and die by impact factors and download counts – but this is one area where the commercial requirements of journal publishing interact with the scholarly desire to get new ideas and research out there. It is the very rarest of rare beasts: that of universally aligned interests.
Since taking over as editors we have been greatly impressed by the quality and range of material submitted to us. We are sad that we couldn’t accept it all, but we hope every author has gained something useful from the review experience. We hope our readers will appreciate the work in this and future editions, and that they will send us their own work in due course. Our biggest challenge remains finding reviewers. We know – as authors ourselves – how frustrating it can be to wait months for review reports. We were less aware however, until we took over Politics, how difficult it can be for editors. We regularly have to approach upwards of 15 colleagues to look at a piece in order to get three reviews in hand. Our record so far is 19 – no doubt more experienced editors have seen worse. That’s a lot of work for us, and a lot of delay for our authors. So before we close we’d like to reiterate a call our predecessors put out. If every submitted paper receives three reviews, it follows that every submitting author should review at least three papers for each submission they make. That’s the only way the system – and our community – can continue ticking along. Please, dear reader, consider taking up this challenge. Send us your papers, and stand ready to review for us in return!