Abstract
We are honored to serve as the editors of the discipline’s flagship journal, American Sociological Review. Although our editorship officially began on January 1, 2021, we have been learning the ropes since last July and handling new submissions since August. This is officially the second issue of our editorship, but it likely won’t be until later this year before some of “our” papers begin to appear in the journal (i.e., those we have seen through the entire process of submission, revision, acceptance, and finally production). We are fortunate that the Notre Dame editorial team left us with a reasonable backlog of papers so we’ve had some breathing room to establish, test, and revise practices and procedures and begin to build a backlog of our own.
In the background of the ASR transition, and at times in the foreground, has been the global pandemic and mass political unrest. The social world has transformed our lives in countless ways, and many of us have faced extraordinary challenges, such as managing e-learning for children, engaging in extensive care work for families, teaching and training students online, as well as dealing with uncertainty, loss, and the inability to gather with loved ones.
During this time, we have regularly wondered how this all might affect the journal. In our first five months of receiving newsubmissions—from August through December 2020—authors submitted 250 papers, just 13 fewer than the same period in 2019. Using available online information, we classified these new submissions by gender of first author and found there were no substantive gender differences between these five months in 2019 and 2020; if anything, there was a slight increase in submissions by women in the later part of 2020. 1 We also observed that the take-up rate in response to our invitations to review was effectively the same in the latter half of 2020 as it was in 2019. We are heartened by the fact that reviewers continue to give their time to review for the journal and are incredibly grateful for their efforts. To be sure, this is a preliminary look at how events of the past year have affected our authors and reviewers, and we will dig more deeply into these data in the coming months and continue to monitor trends. Nonetheless, we wanted to share with our readership the fact that—remarkably—the work of sociologists, and thus the business of ASR, has largely proceeded apace during this extraordinary time.
As the American Sociological Association’s flagship journal, ASR occupies a special place in the discipline. ASR’s mission is “to publish original works of interest to the discipline of sociology in general, new theoretical developments, results of research that advance understanding of fundamental social processes, and important methodological innovations.” While the landscape of scholarly publishing is rapidly changing, ASR remains the “must-read” journal for sociologists and other social scientists, one with an outsized influence on scholarship. ASR also occupies a special place relative to the flagship journals of other social science disciplines, having a larger impact than those in economics, political science, and anthropology. 2
As important as ASR is to professional conversations among American sociologists, it has an equally important role to play in advocating for sociology with external audiences, including scholars in allied disciplines and policymakers. ASR is also an international journal. In 2020, a full 33 percent of original submissions came from sociologists located outside the United States.
The ASR editors play a role in shaping the journal’s content and practices, but the journal belongs to the discipline and its members, and the success and impact of the journal depends on contributions of the scholarly community. Our central aim as editors is to work in the interests of that community, advancing the mission of the journal and maintaining its impact, visibility, and centrality to the life of the discipline.
Our Job as Editors
ASR is important to sociologists because it presents the very best sociological research to internal and external audiences. We have developed our editorial practices with that central role in mind. We are quite conscious of the fact that ASR is important for sociological careers as well. Because of ASR’s distinctive role, we believe we have a special responsibility to ensure authors receive timely, fair, and constructive feedback, whether their papers are among the roughly 6 percent of submissions that are ultimately accepted for publication or the 94 percent that are rejected. In the case of papers rejected without review, we are committed to explaining to authors why their papers are inappropriate for ASR and providing direction, when possible, on alternative outlets. In the case of papers that have gone through the review process and have either been rejected or invited to revise and resubmit, we are committed to providing authors with summaries of the reviews, identifying key areas of concern, and offering guidance on productive directions for revision, whether for ASR or for other outlets. To ensure the journal reflects the breadth of the discipline in regard to area and method, we are continuing the practice of sending specific reviewer guidelines to reviewers of papers falling in the areas of policy, theory, ethnography, and comparative-historical. We are reviewing the guidelines produced by the prior editors and assessing the need for new guidelines for other areas. When faced with difficult decisions on manuscripts outside our areas of expertise, we are also committed to consulting with members of the editorial board who have the requisite expertise to ensure we are making informed decisions on all submissions.
Our Plans for the Journal
Advancing ASR’s mission requires that published work meet the highest standards of scholarship in our field, regardless of theoretical or methodological orientation. Work in central subfields will no doubt be well-represented in ASR regardless of the editorial team. However, we believe ASR should also be the outlet for the most creative and innovative research in all areas of the field, including new and emerging subfields that will drive the disciplinary conversation in the years to come. To this end, we are pursuing three strategies. First, we will continue to build an editorial board composed of scholars with broad theoretical, substantive, and methodological expertise, who also reflect the demographics of the discipline. Second, we have put in place transparent standards of evaluation. While the specific manifestation of such standards varies across subfields (as acknowledged by the specific reviewer guidelines referred to above), our general standards prioritize the following in evaluating quality of research: (a) clarity in writing, organization, and interpretation, (b) theoretical and methodological development and insight, (c) empirical rigor, and (d) innovation and creativity. Finally, we are moving to substantially expand the number of deputy editors. We rely on the deputy editors in a number of different ways (e.g., to remove the editors from the review process when conflicts of interest arise). The most important role deputy editors play is providing expert advice and judgment on promising papers that fall outside our substantive or methodological areas of expertise. Our aim is to have such papers be given a close reading by deputy editors who are fully conversant with the modes of research and our standards of evaluation in that area.
As the premier generalist journal in the field, ASR plays a critical integrative role. It informs readers of developments in subfields that may be quite distant from their own and creates a space in which readers are regularly led to reflect on the links between such research and their own work. In this integrative vein, we also believe ASR should strive (as stated in its mission statement) to publish work that is of general interest, rather than of specific interest to narrow subfields. As editors, we are giving priority to articles that best thread this needle, either because they already bridge subfields, speak to issues of great general interest or importance, are written in a style that is clear and accessible to those outside of the specialist audience, or reviewers readily see ways in which a paper’s impact can be broadened. To be sure, specialization is expected in any growing field of scholarly endeavor, and ASR should be home to exciting, cutting-edge research in all subfields. As the discipline’s flagship journal, however, we believe it should also encourage intellectual cross-fertilization, leave highly specialized research to specialty journals, and advance and invite all sociologists to a common scholarly discussion.
To these ends, we are interested in continuing to broaden the range of research published in ASR. We seek methodological diversity, and especially welcome papers that use qualitative methods, including ethnography, case studies, and interviews. We are interested in receiving submissions that employ new methodological and theoretical approaches, explore novel topics, and represent emerging subfields. We are also committed to broadening the pool of authors and reviewers and will actively engage with sociologists at regional and national meetings when possible, working to demystify the review and publication process and, we hope, encouraging a broader range of scholars to send their best work to ASR.
We will continue to prioritize and encourage the prompt return of reviews and are working diligently to get decisions to authors within a reasonable amount of time. We give papers significant attention the moment they arrive, and each manuscript is given a careful first reading by at least one of the lead editors soon after submission. Some submissions are clearly inappropriate for the journal either because of their focus (e.g., non-sociological or very specialized), because they do not involve original research (e.g., reviews or “think pieces”), or because they are very unlikely to be assessed by reviewers as meeting ASR’s standards for publication. It is not in the best interests of the author, the scholarly community, or the journal to send manuscripts out for review when they are clearly inappropriate for the journal. To facilitate prompt review, we have continued the prior editors’ practice of rejecting such papers quickly rather than subjecting them to the unnecessary delay of a formal review. We are also committed to following the former editors in aiming to minimize the extent to which papers go through multiple rounds of revision (R&R). We are doing this primarily by extending R&R invitations only to papers we believe have a realistic chance of making it through the process. To facilitate this process and round out our assessment, we are inviting editorial board members to weigh in on strong papers early in the review process. Finally, we aim, when at all possible, to avoid inviting new external reviewers on revised submissions. All of these practices should speed the review process and enable us to come to a final decision in most cases after no more than one round of revision.
Our Team
As editors, we are not doing the work of the journal alone. We have already developed a renewed and deep appreciation of the critical work done by reviewers, who selflessly take the time to share their expertise and provide detailed and constructive reviews to authors. We have been fortunate in recruiting an exceptional group of new deputy editors—Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Filiz Garip, Wendy D. Manning, Mignon R. Moore, Steven Pfaff, Patrick T. Sharkey, and Florencia Torche—who will provide feedback and advice alongside continuing deputy editors Tak Wing Chan, Laura J. Enriquez, Alexandra A. Killewald, and Olav Sorenson. We also have an excellent group of editorial board members and welcome 19 new members with expertise in all areas of our discipline.
In Bloomington, we are working with a dedicated group of graduate students who ensure the journal runs smoothly. Muna Adem is our lead editorial assistant and Nora Weber and Helge-Johannes Marahrens serve as editorial assistants. We are incredibly fortunate that Mara Grynaviski will continue in her role as the managing editor. Mara has been in charge of editing and production for the journal for four ASR editorial teams and does a wonderful job of keeping us on task.
Finally, we are incredibly grateful to Rory McVeigh, Omar Lizardo, Sarah Mustillo, and the rest of the Notre Dame editorial team (especially Sarah Skiles) who have taken the time to help us during the transition. We especially thank Rory, who has extended the full measure of Hoosier hospitality in his willingness to answer our many questions and provide insight into the inner workings of the journal. We would also like to thank Rick Van Kooten and Jane McLeod, the Executive Dean and Associate Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, for generously supporting our editorship and ensuring we have the resources we need to carry out our work effectively, and Karen Edwards at ASA for her guidance during the transition and her continuing support of our work as editors.