Editors of ASA journals and the Rose Series submit annual reports to provide insight to sociologists. These narrative reports can be found below. This table can also be referenced for a more detailed quantitative overview of submission processes. Reports from prior years can be found here.
Annual Reports for 2023
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Journal of Health and Social Behavior |
Society and Mental Health |
American Sociological Review
This report reviews the third and final year of our term as editors of the American Sociological Review (ASR). In 2023, we published thirty-six articles. These articles presented groundbreaking research that well-reflected the substantive and methodological diversity of the field. Owing to the service of numerous ad hoc reviewers, our editorial board members, and our journal staff, we have been able to maintain an efficient review and production process that is respectful of the time and effort of all parties involved.
Submissions
From January 1 through December 31, 2023, ASR received 685 submissions, a decrease over the 746 submissions received in 2022. Of those, 34 were accepted unconditionally, 22 conditionally accepted, and 74 were given invitations to revise and resubmit. Given the high standards at ASR, most papers were rejected: 335 were rejected after going through the peer-review process and 198 were rejected after internal review. Four papers were withdrawn by their authors and final decisions had yet to be reached (as of April 1, 2024) on 18 papers. Among new (first) submissions to the journal, 376 (or 66 percent) were sent out for peer review. Among those that underwent the peer review process, 303 (81 percent) were rejected outright, 48 (15 percent) received an invitation to revise and resubmit, and 1 paper was accepted unconditionally (i.e., the presidential address). Among the 111 revised manuscripts received in 2023, half were either accepted subject to minor revisions (20 percent) or accepted outright (30 percent). Fourteen percent received a second revise and resubmit decision, twenty-nine percent were rejected outright, and decisions were still pending (as of April 1, 2024) on seven percent. One of our aims during our term as editors was to make decisions “early” in the process based on whether readers see a short, clear path to publication, avoiding situations in which authors are subjected to multiple rounds of “revise and resubmit” that do not lead to publication. Accordingly, only 6 of 39 papers invited for a second round of R&R were rejected and none of the eight papers invited for additional rounds of revision were rejected.
Using the traditional ASA measure of the acceptance rate (the number of accepted manuscripts divided by the number of all decisions), the acceptance rate for 2023 was 5.13 percent. If we calculate the acceptance rate in the fashion suggested by England in the March 2009 issue of Footnotes—excluding “intermediate” decisions of “revise and resubmit” and “conditionally accepted” and calculating it as the number of accepted manuscripts divided by the number of final decisions—the acceptance rate was 6.00 percent.
High-Quality Peer Review Process
Returning helpful, quality feedback to authors in a timely fashion was a major focus of our day-to-day activity. To meet this goal, we were dependent on the good will and public spirit of our ad hoc reviewers and editorial board members. We are pleased to report that ASR and its authors continued benefit from the service of a remarkably talented and dedicated group of readers. Among first submissions in 2023, the average time from submission to decision in 8.1 weeks. Counting only papers that went through the peer review process, the average time from submission to decision was 11.9 weeks. Given our aim of reducing the need for multiple revisions, we regularly consult with members of the editorial board in the evaluation of revised and resubmitted manuscripts, aiming to make “up or down” decisions as early in the process as possible. This draws out the decision process on such papers and the average time from submission to decision of new “R&R” submissions was 14.2 weeks in 2023.
Visibility of Journal Content
ASR remains the premier general-interest sociology journal by all well-established quantitative measures of scholarly impact. According to Journal Citation Reports, ASR’s two-year impact factor (citations in 2022 to items published in 2020 and 2021) was 9.1. The five-year impact factor was 13.7. The latter represents an all-time high for the journal, while the former is a decline relative to the all-time high reached in 2021. ASR is also the top general-interest journal according to the Google Scholar h-index, with 63 articles published between 2018 and 2022 receiving at least the same number of citations. The median number of citations received by articles in this group, referred to as the h5-median, was 105, matching the all-time high recorded for ASR in 2022.
Articles published in 2023 received a substantial amount of scholarly engagement, media attention, and consideration by policy stakeholders outside of academia. For example, “Effects of Siblings on Cognitive and Sociobehavioral Development: Ongoing Debates and New Theoretical Insights,” by Wei-Hsin Yu and Hope Xu Chan was viewed and downloaded over 10,228 times as of this writing. It is in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, which tracks meaningful engagement with and attention to research. We also note that papers published in ASR garner attention because they focus on some of the core issues of our time, including the paper, “The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022,” published by Julia Lerch, David John Frank, and Evan Schofer, which was viewed and downloaded 4,825 times, and covered by news outlets and tweeted about on X. Other visible papers include “Is the Gender Wage Gap Really a Family Wage Gap in Disguise?” by Youngjoo Cha, Kim A. Weeden, and Landon Schnabel, which was viewed and downloaded over 3,600 times, and “Born for a Storm: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest” by Daniel Karell, Andrew Linke, Edward Holland, and Edward Hendrickson, which was viewed and downloaded 8,866 times, and covered by multiple news media outlets.
The following of the ASR twitter feed continues to grow and the ASR account has become one of the primary ways in which thousands of scholars engage with and disseminate the work published in the journal. As of this writing, the account has 10,800 followers. Updates in the form of new articles coming out “Online First” on the SAGE website as well as issue publication updates get a wide amount of engagement and attention in the form of dozens—and, in the case of the most impactful articles, hundreds—of “likes” and retweets.
Editorial Board and Reviewers
ASR continues to benefit from a diverse and talented editorial board. In 2023, the board had 11 deputy editors and 63 regular board members. The total editorial board (including deputy editors) includes 58 percent women. Forty-three percent of board members represent racial and/or ethnic minorities. From September 2021 through September 2022, 1,150 scholars around the world agreed to serve as ad hoc reviewers, and a good number served more than once. We are grateful for their efforts and their clear and earnest interest in helping authors to produce their best work, even when that work does not ultimately appear in ASR.
DEI Initiatives
Our DEI efforts have involved building a diverse editorial board and maintaining an expanded number of deputy editors (n=11), the majority of whom are women (n=7) and nearly half (n=5) identified as racial/ethnic minorities. We have also taken steps to bring on new reviewers (those who have not reviewed for the journal before) and identify a broader reviewer pool—specifically, advanced grad students, postdocs, assistant professors from underrepresented groups, institutions, and geographic areas (both international and domestic). We have also been engaged in outreach and education about the journal, as we have continued to participate in numerous panels and workshops for ASA sections and departments at public universities to demystify the publication process. We have talked with graduate students, postdocs, and early career scholars (many of whom are from underrepresented backgrounds in regard to race/ethnicity and first generation) about the journal, our role as editors, and best practices for publishing.
We continued to work to increase the diversity of submissions by publishing research in all areas and about phenomena outside of the U.S. We note that in 2022, we received submissions from authors located in 39 different countries who were affiliated with 334 different institutions, suggesting that we are doing well with submissions from around the world, but can do more outreach outside of the U.S. context. We do not have other information related to DEI in regard to submissions, but Sage was set to collect these data in 2023.
Finally, we revisited and revised the guidelines and instructions to reviewers that prior ASR editors developed for different areas such as ethnography, comparative historical, theory, and policy. Given their growth and importance in the discipline, we added new guidelines for experimental methods and qualitative methods. In our revision of these documents, which are available on the ASR website, we drew upon what we learned over the past two years in helping to develop successful articles for publication in the journal. We received feedback from select editorial members and experts in the field before we finalized the new guidelines for reviewers (and authors). Our aim was to provide guidance for how to effectively assess papers under review and to signal our enthusiasm for a whole range of methods and topics.
Staff
The smooth operation of the journal would be impossible without the work of the ASR staff. We have benefited greatly from the extraordinary work of our managing editor, Mara Nelson Grynaviski, and the advice and support from Karen Edwards, the ASA Director of Publications. Our local staff – lead editorial assistant Emily Ekl and editorial assistants Anne Kavalerchik and Yanming Kuang – also made invaluable contributions to ASR’s mission in the final year of our editorship.
After August 1. 2023, new submissions were received by the incoming editors and we and our staff at Indiana University worked with the University of Massachusetts team to ensure a smooth transition. The formal transition was complete on January 1st and ASR is now in their very capable hands. We are pleased with our accomplishments in the past three years, grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the discipline, and we leave the journal in excellent shape.
Arthur Alderson and Dina Okamoto, Editors
City & Community
Last year marked a continuation of City & Community’s upward trajectory. The quality and impact of our papers on the discipline, subfield, and broader field of urban studies improved even further. The initiatives we started in 2021 and 2022 grew in popularity. Our ASA section, Community and Urban Sociology, has expressed approval of the journal’s initiatives and performance, and we have managed to get section members more involved in the journal’s activities. City & Community continues to be on a steady rise.
Manuscript Submissions and Decisions
In 2023, 207 total manuscripts were submitted to the journal. Of these, 13 were accepted, 41 were invited to revise and resubmit, 40 were rejected, and 113 were rejected without review (that is, “desk rejected”). The latter number is high because City & Community is well-known among the large community of scholars and practitioners in the broad field of urban studies. We therefore regularly receive submissions from authors with backgrounds in such disciplines as urban planning, architecture, and policy that are not intellectual fits for the journal and do not conform to our guidelines.
Among the 169 new (that is, first) submissions to the journal, 56 (or 33.1%) were sent out for peer review and the rest were rejected without review. Among those that underwent the peer review process, 35 (62.5%) were rejected outright, 20 (35.7%) were invited to revise and resubmit, and one (1.8%) was accepted subject to minor changes.
A total of 38 revised manuscripts were submitted in 2023. Of these, 13 (34.2%) were accepted, 20 (52.6%) were invited to revise and resubmit, and 5 (13.2%) were rejected. First, of these 38 revised manuscripts, 20 were for first revisions. One (5%) of these 20 was accepted, 14 (70%) were once again invited to revise and resubmit, and 5 (25%) were rejected. Second, of these 38 revised manuscripts, 11 were for second revisions. Of these 11, 5 (45.5%) were accepted and 6 (54.5%) were invited to once again revise and resubmit. Finally, of these 38 revised manuscripts, 7 were for third and/or fourth revisions, and all of them were accepted.
Using the traditional ASA indicator for the acceptance rate (the number of accepted manuscripts divided by the number of overall decisions, multiplied by 100), the acceptance rate at City & Community for 2023 was 6.3%. If we instead calculate the acceptance rate as accepted papers divided by final decisions, multiplied by 100 (as suggested by England in the March 2009 issue of Footnotes), the acceptance rate was 13.8%.
Finally, we learned last year that the journal’s Impact Factor (from 2022, the most recent year available) is now 2.5, which is the highest in the journal’s history (up from 2.25, in 2021). The 5-year Impact Factor is now also 2.5.
Editorial Board
Last year we once again diversified the editorial board even further. The 2022 board consisted of 30 people: 13 men (43.3%) and 17 women (56.7%); 15 White (50%) and 15 from racial minority groups (50%); and of these board members 8 were African American/Black, 4 Hispanic/Latino(a), and 3 Asian/Asian American. Last year’s board consisted of 29 people: 15 men (51.7%) and 14 women (48.3%); 9 White (31%) and 20 from racial minority groups (69%); and of these board members 11 were African American/Black, 5 Hispanic/Latino(a), and 4 Asian/Asian American. And of these 29, 4 were deputy editors who handle the review process for several manuscripts per year and 2 were book review co-editors.
Special Issues
Special issues are important for the journal because they expose urban sociology to audiences outside of the subfield and allow scholars to use urban sociological theory to address significant questions in sociology and society.
For the 2023 December issue we published a special issue entitled “Environmentalizing Urban Sociology,” with Hillary Angelo (also a board member) and Miriam Greenberg (a former board member) as guest editors. Along with an introductory paper by the guest editors and five original peer-reviewed articles, the special issue also featured a concluding commentary by Kevin Loughran. The issue got broad and positive attention.
We have also been working on a special issue entitled “W. E. B. Du Bois and Urban Sociology: The Philadelphia Negro at 125 Years,” with Freeden Blume Oeur and Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana (also a board member) serving as guest editors. It will be published in the December 2024 issue.
Initiatives and Features
Webinar Series
Last year we continued with our webinar series with a primary aim of professional development for early career scholars. It focuses on the basics of academic journal publishing. Topics have included writing manuscripts (“How to Write (and Not Write) Journal Articles: A City & Community Perspective”), reviewing manuscripts (“How to be a Reviewer: Reviewing Papers for Journals”), and revising and resubmitting (“Great, but Now What? How to Handle R&Rs”). I conducted each of them with assistance from Daniela Tagtachian, the journal’s managing editor. All events were well attended with hundreds of registrants, most of whom were doctoral students and junior faculty. We plan on regularly hosting virtual events on these and other topics in the years to come.
We also started a new webinar series. This one combines professional development and substantive content through a panel format. Its primary aim has been to showcase scholarly work in urban sociology and the professional and personal experiences urban scholars have had in their intellectual pursuits. (Sarah Mayorga, a current editorial board member, first proposed the idea for this series.) The first virtual panel event was on studying racism and capitalism in cities (“Studying Racism and Capitalism in Cities”), the second one was on Black marginality in places (“Beyond Black Marginality: Expanding Our View of Black People & Places”), and the third was on writing crossover books for reaching broader audiences (“Reaching a Broader Audience: How to Publish Crossover Books”). Each one assembled experts in these topics who shared their work as well as practical and philosophical guidance for people interested in exploring these topics.
Professional Development
Launched on January 1, 2021, the Urban Scholars Development Program is a formal mentoring program for young urban researchers. Aimed at graduate students, post-docs, and recent graduates, this program formalizes City & Community’s existing reputation as a welcoming journal for up-and-coming scholars. We are particularly interested in supporting underrepresented scholars through this program. We recruited 15 faculty mentors and have matched 11 mentees to faculty mentors since it began. Two mentees were assigned mentors in 2023. Five of our mentees have been women and six have been students of color. We hope this program helps cultivate the next generation of urban scholars while improving the quality of submissions to the journal.
Podcasts
ASA’s interviews with authors who publish in City & Community are posted on our website. I am also a host of “New Books in Sociology,” a channel on the “New Books Network,” for which I conduct podcast interviews with book authors. I have been periodically interviewing urban sociologists about their recent books, giving them, the journal, and the subfield some broader attention. I also recruited two other hosts to join us in promoting urban books whose authors they interview. This initiative is being conducted in collaboration with CUSS. We hope both podcast endeavors generate some additional attention for the journal and the work we publish.
Social Media
The City & Community twitter account (@CiCoJournal) was active throughout the year. We have increased our number of followers to 1,625.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the journal has been a priority since I began my editorship. Our mentoring program and webinar series and our efforts to diversify the editorial board and expand the urban sociology discourse through special issues are examples of the work we’ve been doing to reach these goals. We have also changed our editorial board selection process so that people can self-nominate and so that the Community and Urban Sociology Section’s Publications Committee is included in the decision-making. We hope this will address concerns in our board membership. Finally, we have also been aiming for diversity along multiple axes when it comes to who we send our invitations to review to.
Richard E. Ocejo, Editor
Contemporary Sociology
During the 2023 calendar year, Contemporary Sociology was active in producing high quality book reviews, review essays and other longer review pieces. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many publishers changed their policy of sending review copies of books to the office directly. Instead, typically they send an announcement email and/or an electronic version of the book to the editor.
After reviewing these titles for their suitability, we request physical copies from publishers. Therefore, we are receiving much fewer physical copies of books that are not suitable for review in CS. During the 2023 calendar year, more than 600 books were considered. In Volume 52, in 2023, we published six issues including 240 regular reviews (averaging approximately 40 regular reviews per issue), 27 review essays of 38 books as well as 2 symposia and 1 comment.
Some of our review essays include comparative analysis of multiple books on the same theme, while some had discussions and different perspectives on the same book. Overall, we have featured 278 books.
Journal Processes
Every two months, our editorial associates prepare lists of new books along with abstracts for our editorial board to review. Editorial board members are asked to suggest potential reviewers for each title in their areas of interest. The editor ranks all the suggestions once we receive them from our editorial board. Based on the suggestions and advice of the editorial board, reviews and review essays are commissioned. The journal’s managing editor copyedits and formats all the work received electronically in preparation for publication. The copyedited materials are sent to SAGE for typesetting, and several sets of proofs are corrected prior to publication. Editor, managing editor and both editorial associates go through the final proofs before the issue goes to print.
During this past year, Contemporary Sociology launched a podcast. Each issue, one author of a book records a podcast on the book writing process. This format allows a conversation between the author and the reviewer, allowing the readers to see the book publication process.
Editorial Board Members
In 2023 we had 51 editorial board members. Our editorial board members are 61% women, 29% men, 4% non-binary, 2 % pna and 4% unknown. Our board was 29 % minority 14% Unknown. Our editorial board represents a wide range of sub-specializations of sociology. We expanded our editorial board to reflect some of the underrepresented areas and include some substantive areas we receive more books in. The expanded board also helps the post-Covid-19 fatigue among editorial board members and our reviewer base. We also have representation from a wide range of organizations including research and teaching-focused institutions as well as community colleges. The full composition of the editorial board can be found on our website.
DEI Initiatives
To ensure the diversity of the reviewers and to ensure the reviewers are not limited to my networks, Contemporary Sociology shares bi-monthly lists of the books to be reviewed with the editorial board to ask for suggestions. All editorial board members are asked to send in suggestions for possible reviewers. This practice expands our pool of potential reviewers and ensures the reviewers are not limited by the editor’s academic networks.
I would like to thank my editorial team: managing editor Jean Littlejohn, editorial associates Laurel Naik and Brittany Salvetti, our editorial board, and many reviewers. Finally, I would like to thank Karen Gray Edwards at ASA for her valuable help.
Yasemin Besen-Cassino, Editor
Contexts
Operations
In 2023, Contexts: Sociology for the Public featured a slew of changes as a new editorial team began to implement our vision. As we transitioned the journal from an older system of email submissions to SageTrack, we brought an entirely new editorial team on board: Culture (Jooyoung Lee), Trends (JP Pardo-Guerra), Book Reviews (Joseph Cohen), In Brief (written by our graduate student editors, Parker Muzzerall, Sophie Liu, Colter Uscola, Elena van Stee, and Rose Zhang), Policy Briefs (Laura Beth Nielsen), and Photo Essays (Ryan Centner). Letta Page returned to her position as the senior managing editor, overseeing the publication and its website. We also spearheaded a number of key innovations designed to expand the magazine’s footprint and realize our desire to internationalize the authorship and audience.
First, we expanded our social media portfolio, adding TikTok, Mastodon, Threads, and BlueSky to existing accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Our Twitter presence, for instance, added over 1,000 new followers (for a total of 14.2K followers)—a significant number given the overall decline in Twitter’s user base. This effort was bolstered by our new effort to create, produce, and distribute short videos that simultaneously act as promotional tools for encouraging pitches and increasing visibility, and for touting the peer-reviewed feature articles in each new issue (and their 30-day free access windows).
Next, while we maintained the existing sections of the magazine, we made some changes, including adding a new book review format in which two (or more) books with overlapping themes are reviewed together and choosing to theme our Q&A interviews for each volume year. In 2023, we interviewed five international journalists who draw heavily from the social sciences and represent five different regions of the world.
Third, we revived the In Brief section of the magazine. In 2022, Contexts published just 17 of these precis of new research across sociology and related journals; in 2023, we featured 34 entries written by 5 graduate student editors. Further, each issue in this volume featured a minimum of 3 In Brief entries focused on work written in and about contexts other than the United States (an international focus that spread to the other sections of the magazine, including the photo essays and culture pieces).
Fourth, in keeping with our effort to expand the publicly engaged wing of sociological inquiry, we revived the Context Blog. In 2023 alone, and with the enormous help of our new graduate student blog editor Elena van Stee at the University of Pennsylvania, we published 63 blog entries, 21 of which featured video interviews conducted and produced by the graduate student editorial team. With our lively online publishing schedule and promotion of new issues, there are few days when Contexts is not being featured on social media.
Fifth, we developed an electronic “digest” sent to our editorial board members, former contributors to the magazine, and new authors as each new issue rolls out. The digest is an interactive table of contents, previewing the issue and including direct links to each new piece, from our lively interviews to in-depth, peer-reviewed feature articles, public policy briefs, beautiful photo essays, and deep dives into trends, cultures, and books.
Finally, in keeping with the public-facing mission of the magazine, we have imagined a catchy new slogan. Each issue now trumpets our commitment to social science that hews to “the 4 Rs” by being rigorous, relevant, readable, and rad! This branding slogan helps distinguish Contexts within the ecology of the ASA’s otherwise exclusively academic portfolio of journals, and it immediately signals our team’s approach to increasing accessibility without compromising intellectual seriousness.
All these innovations have served our audiences while growing our reach, and they have been largely driven by the contributions of our graduate student editors. Our students are responsible for writing in briefs, conducting interviews, and producing videos, as well as curating and editing the blog. They have also been enabled by the fabulous contributions of a range of talented authors and contributors, the willingness of social scientists to engage with the magazine as reviewers, and the ongoing work of our section editors. In the print edition of the magazine, 2023 saw the publication of 19 peer-reviewed feature articles, 34 In Briefs, 5 Q&As, 7 photo essays, 5 culture reviews, 8 trends pieces, 5 policy briefs, 4 book reviews (of 9 books total), and 4 One Thing I Know essays. Article downloads, as reported by SAGE, were robust, totaling 571,908 over the year.
Editorial Efforts on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
In addition to these innovations, we have worked hard to ensure Contexts continues to realize the discipline’s goals for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Currently, 43% of our editorial board identifies as minorities. Furthermore, in line with our proposed editorial vision, we have deliberately worked to cultivate articles and in briefs that are written by non-U.S. scholars, are about places and peoples outside of North America, or both. Our editorial board, section editorships, and graduate editors are international, as are our reviewer requests. Finally, while we cannot ensure author diversity across any set of metrics, we believe every issue represents the full gamut of sociological research and the discipline’s own diversity. Likewise, while we cannot guarantee a given reviewer will agree to review a manuscript, we are intentional about making sure our reviewer pool also reflects the goals and aims of the discipline and the ASA.
It is abundantly clear to us—and we hope to the ASA as well—that our editorship is already defined by a series of creative and impactful initiatives that elevate the profile of our professional association and, indeed, our discipline.
Seth Abrutyn and Amin Ghaziani, Editors
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
The Journal of Health and Social Behavior has long been recognized as the flagship journal of medical sociology in the U.S. Our 2023 impact factor is 5.0 (five-year impact of 5.8), nearly double the IF from 2019 (2.4) and on par with 2022 (5.0).
In 2023, JHSB published 35 articles and four open-access policy briefs across four issues. These articles included qualitative and quantitative studies of the US and other countries. The subject matter spanned the breadth of medical sociology and intersected with other disciplines such as public health and health policy, and also other subdisciplines within sociology including gender and sexuality, criminology, demography, race and ethnic relations, immigration, and more. The journal content also reflects cutting-edge and timely topics including transgender health, the political context of reproductive health care, incarceration and health, and more. For each issue’s policy brief, the editor-in-chief selected one paper with clear implications for policy or health care practice and invited the author(s) to craft a one-page jargon-free summary tailored to policymakers, media outlets, and the general public. These briefs appear prominently in each issue of JHSB and on the journal’s home page.
Journal Operations
Editor-in-chief, Deborah Carr (Boston University) was appointed for the three-year term, 2023-25, and agreed to stay on for one additional year (through 2026), per the request of the ASA Publications Committee. In 2023, the first full year of her editorship, JHSB received 423 new manuscripts, which was slightly higher than the 409 manuscripts received in 2022, but a little lower than the 452 manuscripts received in 2021 and 501 in 2020, and a modest increase from the submissions received in 2019 (391). The atypically high number of submissions during 2020 and 2021 are due in part to a bump in submissions to Special Issue calls, and a spike in papers using early data from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The journal continues to be highly selective. After initial review by the editorial team—either by the editor-in-chief or in consultation with a deputy editor—64.1 percent were “desk rejected” without being sent out for peer review. The average time between submission and desk-rejection was 4.2 days (or 0.6 weeks), an improvement over 2022 (1.1 weeks) and 2021 (1.8 weeks). Of the 152 (35.9%) papers sent out for peer review, 29.6 percent received a revise and resubmit decision. Overall, the average time between initial submission and first review decision was 8.9 weeks, considerably shorter than 10.3 weeks in 2022 and the 12.7-week turnaround in 2021.
For papers that were eventually accepted, production time (i.e., the time between a paper being accepted and appearing in print in an issue) was 7.4 months. A slight increase from 2022 (6.67 months). This production time represents a healthy but not excessive backlog, which enables us to select articles carefully to create thematically organized subsections of each issue. JHSB’s production time is superior to many other journals. The average time from acceptance to online publication (Online First) was 3.3 months.
Deputy Editors, Editorial Board, Peer Reviewers, and Journal Staff
JHSB’s operation depends on more than just the efforts of the editor. It requires contributions from an extensive team of individuals who keep the publication process moving along efficiently.
The team of Boston-based Deputy Editors has worked hard to assist with desk reject decisions, identify potential reviewers, make decision recommendations, and draft decision letters. The Deputy Editors span multiple areas of methodological and substantive expertise that represent important “classic” and new areas in medical sociology. The Deputy Editors are Wen Fan (Boston College, work and health, quantitative cross-national studies); Neha Gondal (Boston University; network approaches and social inequalities); Joseph Harris (Boston University, global health and qualitative methods); Tiffany Joseph (Northeastern University, U.S. health policy and qualitative methods); Andrew Stokes (Boston University School of Public Health, population health); and Sara Moorman (Boston College, social relations and health).
To create opportunities and promote diversity in our editorial board, the Editors continued to select editorial board members based on an open call for nominations. This process is intended to reduce network-based selection bias and allows the team to recruit from a wider pool of scholars. Overall, the 2023 editorial board composition remains diverse in terms of gender (71 percent women)) and race-ethnicity (36 percent racial-ethnic minorities). The complete list of editorial board members is listed on the JHSB website (https://journals.sagepub.com/editorial-board/HSB).
JHSB values its many supportive and attentive peer reviewers. The Editor extends her sincerest gratitude to the outgoing, continuing, and new editorial board members and the many ad hoc peer reviewers who have generously contributed their time and expertise to JHSB. A special thanks to Iliya Gutin and Latonya Trotter, who are recognized by the editorial team as particularly dedicated and exemplary reviewers.
Deborah Carr acknowledges her talented editorial office team: Managing Editor Ryan Trettevik; Copyeditor Michaela Curran; and Editorial Assistant Meghann Lucy. Ryan brings deep expertise and institutional knowledge of all aspects of the journal’s operations and is an invaluable member of the team. Michaela Curran is our talented and thorough Copy Editor. BU sociology graduate student Meghann Lucy has been our editorial assistant since the journal arrived at Boston University. She wears many hats and carries out all tasks expertly, including processing new submissions, responding to some author queries, working with Michaela in copy editing, and expanding JHSB’s social media activity. Follow us on Twitter @JofHSB to see Meghann’s creative work in publicizing the published articles. Meghann will leave this role in Summer 2024, when she starts a tenure-track faculty position. We are delighted that BU sociology doctoral candidate Elinore Avni will step into the role of editorial assistant.
The Editor also thanks Karen Edwards and Jamie Aughenbaugh at ASA for their invaluable assistance and our readers for their continued support. SAGE also provide important technical support, and assistance with coordinating JHSB authors’ blog posts in Sage Perspectives. The authors of particularly timely or newsworthy articles are invited to write use-friendly blogs that recap the study findings and place them in a broader context.
Deborah Carr, Editor
Journal of World-Systems Research
In 2023, the Journal of World-Systems Research has continued our mission to produce high-quality, interesting, and timely research articles as well as new scholarship that incorporates essays and commentaries from scholars, activists, and artists along with interviews with scholars and activists deeply engaged within the field of world-systems analysis and the political and social movements that are so often a focus of our research, such as Eleonora Gea Piccardi’s interview with Meral Çiçek from the Kurdish Women’s Movement. Through this new scholarship we have incorporated voices and viewpoints outside the traditional academic milieu, making invaluable additions to the field.
The two issues published in 2023 incorporated special sections pushing the boundaries of world-systems analysis through complexity theory, as well as commemorating Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the founders of this research methodology. The research articles published continued to demonstrate the wide applicability of world-systems analysis across disciplines and subdisciplines, especially as the diversity of participating scholars has continued to grow.
JWSR continues to actively seek out scholars of color, newer voices in the field, and reviewers from universities outside the United States and Europe. In order to encourage greater participation, we are releasing a Call for Reviewers to draw in individuals whose perspectives will positively impact the growth of world-systems research. Over the course of 2023 we have seen a marked increase in new participants joining in to review articles, which has accompanied a continued expansion of diverse voices not only expanding sociological and anthropological research within the world-systems perspective but also innovating on a theoretical and analytical level to further a dynamic approach to social science.
Andrej Grubačić, Editor
Rose Series in Sociology
The ASA Rose Series in Sociology publishes highly visible, accessible books that integrate substantive areas in sociology, such as inequality, environment, immigration, and criminology. The books are designed to offer synthesizing analyses, challenge prevailing paradigms, and offer fresh views of enduring controversies. Because of their broad scope and policy relevance, the volumes published in the Rose Series are disseminated in areas beyond their focus to the broader professional and intellectual communities.
The Rose Series offers its authors a unique opportunity to combine the intellectual rigor associated with refereed journals, the visibility of publishing with a major press, and the benefit of a sustained marketing campaign that extends beyond sociology into related disciplines and relevant policy circles. The books are jointly published by the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), and our editors work closely with RSF’s Director of Publications, Suzanne Nichols. Each manuscript is evaluated through a meticulous review process and is chosen for its quality, sophistication, and policy relevance. Only a few selected volumes are added each year.
Operations
Two manuscripts were completed in 2023:
- Who Benefits from College by Jennie Brand. Completed in Spring 2023, Brand presented her work at the 2023 ASA Annual Meeting in a Book Forum Special Session.
- Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility by Robert Courtney Smith, Foreword by Manuel Castro. Smith will present his work at 2024 ASA Annual Meeting in a Book Forum Special Session
Books currently under contract with the Rose Series are:
- Race and Gender Discrimination in the Stalled Revolution by Reginald Byron and Vincent Roscigno
- Immigrants, Entrepreneurs, and Urban Redevelopment by Angie Chung and Jan Lin
- Journey to Adulthood in Uncertain Times by Robert Crosnoe and Shannon Cavanagh
- Learning to Lead: The Intersectional Politics of the Second Generation by Veronica Terriquez
Editorial Board
We are grateful for the 24 members on our 2023 editorial board and would particularly like to thank outgoing members for their service: Rene Almelin, Laura M. Carpenter, Ernesto Castañeda, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Jooyoung Kim Lee, Jeff Manza, Brea Louise Perry, Francesca Polletta, Brian Powell, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Lesley J. Wood.
We brought on 8 new members who started January 2024: Lisa Marie Broidy, Kara Cebulko, Laura E Enriquez, Karen B. Guzzo, Tarry Hum, Kecia R. Johnson, John R. Logan, Jane Lilly Lopez, John Mollenkopf, Stacy Torres, Rachel Bridges Whaley.
There will be five editorial board vacancies for the 2025 -2027 service-period. We will continue to broaden its diversity.
Editorial Efforts on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The ASA Rose Book Speaker Series is a new lecture series established by the University at Albany Rose Editors. Rose Series books, as potentially translational research works, are clear examples of the connection between social science research and policy initiatives or more broadly academia and public policy. In addition to disseminating the research of Rose authors to diverse audiences, a central goal of the Series is to profile the potential policy influence of their research. While the work of creating the series happened throughout 2023, the inaugural lecture will be held in Fall of 2024 and will feature recent Rose Series in Sociology author Dr. Robert Smith (CUNY Graduate Center) discussing his book, Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility. The yearly speaker series will involve an online component and will be advertised widely within SUNY, and also among the institutions of the Rose Series editorial board members. The series will be advertised broadly across the ASA community and accessible for remote participation.
The Rose Series is committed to recruiting, investing in, and empowering a diverse and equitable scholarship. Our current manuscripts deal with pressing issues of equity, race, gender, and immigration.
Rose is committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in both the projects we select and support and the involvement of scholars from underrepresented groups on the editorial board. This includes people of various cultures, ages, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities, socioeconomic statuses, parental statuses, religions, physical or mental abilities, and political affiliations.
Joanna Dreby, Aaron Major, Steven F. Messner, and Katherine Trent, Editors
Social Psychology Quarterly
Editorial Team and Board
The current Social Psychology Quarterly (SPQ) editorial team began its term in January 2021 and began handling new manuscript submissions in the summer of 2020. The managing editor organizes the day-to-day operations of SPQ, ensuring that manuscripts are processed in a timely manner and that production goes smoothly. Two outstanding University of Georgia graduate students held this position in 2023. Tenshi Kawashima served as managing editor from July 1, 2022 until June 30, 2023. Alexander Smith took over the reins on July 1, 2023 and served until the end of December. Gianna Mosser continued in her long-standing role as copyeditor, ensuring that SPQ articles were clearly written and that they followed ASA style and editorial guidelines.
We are fortunate to have three outstanding Deputy Editors to support SPQ operations. In this role, Corey D. Fields, Matthew O. Hunt, and Stefanie Mollborn conduct reviews, serve as primary manuscript editors, and act as editor-in-chief when the co-editors have conflicts of interest. Further supporting the editorial team are members of the editorial board. In 2023, the board had 40 members. 12 members of the board identified as a member of a racial/ethnic minority group, and 24 identified as female. Special thanks to our editorial board: Mark T. Berg, Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, Jamillah E. Bowman Williams, Kait Boyle, Celeste Campos-Castillo, Bryan Christopher Cannon, Damon M. Centola, Sapna Cheryan, Coye V. Cheshire, Lynn Gencianeo Chin, Steven E. Clayman, Kristen Annette Clayton, Linda E. Francis, Carla Goar, Verna M. Keith, Nikki Khanna, Freda B. Lynn, Kristen Marcussen, Guadalupe Marquez-Velarde, Ludwin E. Molina, Ellis Prentis Monk, Jr., Chantrey J. Murphy, Shira Offer, David Pedulla, Craig M. Rawlings, David E. Rohall, Mary R. Rose, Jason Schnittker, Doug Schrock, Alicia D. Simmons, Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo, Shane D. Soboroff, Catherine J. Taylor, Mieke Beth Thomeer, Lisa Slattery Walker, Monica M. Whitham, and Jun Zhao.
Journal Operations
Editorial Statistics. From January 1 through December 31, 2023, SPQ received 162 submissions. Among new (first) submissions to the journal, 65.1 percent were sent out for peer review. Among those that underwent peer review, 66.2 percent were rejected outright, and 26.8 percent received an invitation to revise and resubmit. Among revised submissions received in 2023, the majority were either accepted subject to minor revisions (37.7 percent) or accepted outright (43.4 percent). 13.2 percent of the papers received a second revise and resubmit decision, and 5.7 percent were rejected outright.
Using the traditional ASA indicator for the acceptance rate (the number of accepted manuscripts divided by the number of overall decisions, multiplied by 100), the acceptance rate for 2023 was 10.9 percent. If we instead calculate the acceptance rate as accepted papers divided by final decisions, multiplied by 100 (as suggested by England in the March 2009 issue of Footnotes), the acceptance rate was 14.2 percent. The average number of weeks from submission to decision in 2023 was 7.7 weeks, down from 9.2 weeks in 2022.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives
This year, our primary DEI efforts involved promoting diverse scholarship on social psychology and race by publishing the special issue on Race, Racism, and Discrimination in September 2023 (see below for details). In the years leading up to the special issue, we promoted our call for papers in ASA section newsletters, on Twitter and the ASA website to increase the involvement of underrepresented scholars as authors, reviewers, and readers of SPQ. In all of these venues, we included with our call for papers a message aimed at growing our pool of reviewers with expertise in race and racism:
Social Psychology Quarterly is seeking to expand our reviewer pool. We invite reviewers in all areas to join our pool but we are especially interested in scholars with expertise to review papers for the special issue on Race, Racism, and Discrimination (see the call below). If you are interested in being added to our reviewer pool, please click on the link below to provide your contact information. Being added to our reviewer database does not obligate you to review for us. Thanks!
This effort was successful at expanding the scholarly and demographic diversity of our reviewers. We had 81 scholars complete the form to sign up as new reviewers and were able to rely on these and other new reviewers to review the influx of papers we received for the special issue. We will continue to invite reviewers to sign up by sending the link to section newsletters.
We see evidence that the outreach associated with the special issue increased submissions to SPQ on race and race relations. In addition to the articles that appeared in the special issue, we published ten papers in 2023 on topics related to social psychology and race. Promoting the special issue and these articles in the coming year will raise SPQ’s profile as a journal that publishes cutting-edge social psychological research on race and ethnic relations.
Special Issue on Social Psychology of Race, Racism, and Discrimination
In 2003, SPQ published a special issue edited by Dr. Lawrence Bobo on the social psychology of race, racism, and discrimination. Drs. Corey D. Fields, Verna M. Keith, and Justine Tinkler spent 2022 organizing the 20th anniversary special issue on the same topic to appear in September 2023. We received 69 submissions. There were so many excellent papers that we published a double issue in September 2023 with seven full-length articles, three research notes, and an introduction by Lawrence Bobo.
Additional Initiatives
SPQ SNAPS Slides. The rebooted SPQ SNAPS began to be published in 2022 in the form of author-created slides that summarize the research in a format for use in classrooms. These presentation slides are hosted by SAGE as Online Supplemental Material associated with the article published on SAGE’s SPQ site. Instructors can download SPQ Snaps Slides and have a convenient, polished, and author-approved set of materials for teaching articles published in SPQ. We are delighted to call attention to the seven SPQ SNAPS Slides published in 2023:
- Can Customers Affect Racial Discrimination in Hiring? by David S. Pedulla, Sophie Allen, and Livia Baer-Bositis (March 2023)
- Pay Justice and Pay Satisfaction: The Influence of Reciprocity, Social Comparisons, and Standard of Living by Jule Adriaans, Carsten Sauer, and Cristóbal Moya (March 2023)
- Contesting Reports of Racism, Contesting the Rights to Assess by Tianhao Zhang (June 2023)
- Do Experiences of Success and Failure Influence Beliefs about Inequality? Evidence from Selective University Admission by Rebecca Wetter and Claudia Finger (June 2023)
- A Network Approach to Assessing the Relationship between Discrimination and Daily Emotion Dynamics by Faith M. Deckard, Andrew Messamore, Bridget J. Goosby, and Jacob E. Cheadle (September 2023)
- The Multiple Meanings of Discrimination by Catherine E. Harnois (December 2023)
- Mapping the Content of Asian Stereotypes in the United States: Intersections with Ethnicity, Gender, Income, and Birthplace by Stephen Benard, Bianca Manago, Anna Acosta Russian, and Youngjoo Cha (December 2023)
Reclassifying Social Psychology Quarterly as a sociology journal. The editorial team also continued our conversations with SAGE and ASA about correcting the misclassification of Social Psychology Quarterly in the Web of Science. Clarivate (mis-)classifies SPQ under ‘Psychology, Social’ rather than under Sociology. In 2022, we developed a proposal for Clarivate to correct this by classifying SPQ as a Sociology journal. Clarivate, however, had paused all classification requests from existing journals to attend to new journal classifications. Clarivate lifted this pause as we were finalizing this report (May 2024), and ASA has submitted the classification request on our behalf. We do not know the timeline for Clarivate’s decision, but we are hopeful that they will act quickly to rectify their error.
Jody Clay-Warner and Justine Tinkler, Editors
Society and Mental Health
2023 marks the thirteenth anniversary of Society and Mental Health. Since its inception, SMH has published papers covering the range of subjects relevant to the study of mental illness and health from a sociological perspective, including contributions to the study of the stress process, the general and specific causes and consequences of mental health and illness, mental illness and the life course, social construction and medicalization, mental illness and marginalized groups, and important contributions to theory. In keeping with the journal’s guiding principles, SMH has also devoted space for emerging issues in the sociology of mental health and illness, as well as articles on public policy, community mental health, and mental health reform.
Most notably, in 2023 SMH reached a new record in ranking by Journal Citation Reports. SMH rose from a ranking of 30 in sociology journals to 9, with an impact factor of 5.1. This accomplishment could not have been achieved without the support of our highly qualified editorial board and reviewers, as well as the talented authors who submitted their work to the journal.
Furthermore, during 2023, SMH published 14 articles. We continued to organize journals into thematic sections as means of attracting wider interest to the journal.
Journal Operations
During 2023, the journal was fortunate to have Gale Cassidy continuing as the managing editor, a position she has held for most of the journal’s existence. In 2023, SMH received 225 new manuscripts, compared with 170 in 2022. Of these, 155 (68.9%) were rejected without further review. We emphasize that the primary reason we reject manuscripts without review is because the manuscripts are submitted without a sociological grounding or focus. These are typically papers more appropriate for public health or psychology journals and appear to be submitted based on the name of the journal, without any clearer knowledge of SMH’s sociological orientation. In rejecting papers without review, we are quite clear as to the reason for this rejection and in this rejection letter describe the journal’s sponsorship by the Section on the Sociology of Mental Health, as well as the journal’s focus on scholarly work set within and intended to contribute to the sociology of mental health.
Of the 70 papers sent out for peer review, 27 (38.6%) received an invitation to revise and resubmit. The average time to a decision for peer-reviewed papers was just about six weeks.
In terms of production time, papers accepted in 2023 were generally published in the journal within one year of acceptance or less.
Deputy Editors, Editorial Board, Peer Reviewers, and Journal Staff
The successful management of SMH depends on the work of our Deputy Editors and Editorial Board members. Our Deputy Editors—Robyn Lewis Brown, Christy LaShaun Erving, Stephani Hatch, Jong Hyun Jung, and John Taylor—have provided high-quality service to the journal as both managing editors of papers and reviewers. We also thank the departing members of the editorial board: Kerry Michael Dobransky, San Juanita García, Gilbert C. Gee, Kristen Marcussen, Teresa L. Scheid, Jason Schnittker, and Peggy A. Thoits.
New members to the SMH board for January 1, 2023 include: Matthew Andersson, Gabriele Ciciurkaite, Molly Copeland, Patricia Drentea, Mathew D. Gayman, Matthew K. Grace, Brittany Nicole Hearne, Ning Hsieh, Lei Jin, Fabrice Stanley Julien, Jong Hyun Jung , Byron Miller, Uchechi A. Mitchell, Dawne M. Mouzon, Atsushi Narisada, Kei Nomaguchi, Richard J. Petts, Fernando I. Rivera, Karen A. Snedker, Patricia A. Thomas, and Xiaozhao Y Yang.
SMH also depends on a wide range of ad hoc reviewers who provide invaluable input. Without their assistance we would not have been able to advance the mission of SMH and publish the wide range of scholarship that reflects the diversity of scholarship on the sociology of mental health and illness.
Editorial Efforts on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We substantially increased the diversity of the editorial board in 2022. In 2021, 24% of the board represented non-white scholars, but in 2022 this increased to 47%, while we maintained approximately two-thirds of the board identifying as women. Additionally, in 2022, four scholars assumed the role of Deputy Editors. Two identify as men and two as women, and two of the four are Black scholars. In 2023, we added a fifth Deputy Editor, creating a team of Deputy Editors for which the majority are non-white scholars. In 2023, we also maintained a diverse editorial board, with over half of the board constituting non-white scholars and less than 40% identifying as male. As we greatly rely on the members of our editorial board as the primary basis of reviewers, this also contributed to the diversity of reviewers for papers submitted to the journal.
Additionally, the lead article in the March 2023 issue addressed the intergenerational effects of Canada’s residential schools system. To our knowledge, this is the first paper published in an ASA journal to examine the mental heath effects of this residential school system, and we nominated this paper for media promotion.
We also wish to emphasize that we welcome research from a variety of methodological orientations and scholars at all levels of the profession. In 2023, we published both quantitative and qualitative research, with authors stretching from graduate students to established professors. We hope that scholars employing a diverse set of sociological orientations to the study of mental health will feel welcome to submit their work to Society and Mental Health.
Finally, we would once again like to thank Karen Gray Edwards (ASA Director of Publications), who provided invaluable advice and assistance in 2023.
Alex Bierman and Scott Schieman, Editors
Sociological Methodology
The year 2023 was the fourth year of the editorship of Sociological Methodology under co-editors David Melamed and Mike Vuolo, located at the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. The editors’ tenure has been extended for a total period of five years. Editors Melamed and Vuolo work alongside continuing managing editor Lisa Savage.
Volume 53 in 2023 marked the third time that SM appeared as multiple issues, as opposed to a single annual volume. For the first 50 volumes, SM was a single hardbound volume published once per year. This approach has permitted articles to appear quickly in a print issue. The journal also continued its recent tradition of including an accompanying podcast for a single article per issue. The editors continue to promote the journal on social media, which was new for the journal, in order to maximize reach and promote groundbreaking methodology.
Editorial Efforts on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The editors aimed to diversify the journal along several dimensions. First, the board of SM is as diverse as ever in terms of representation of both women and non-White scholars. Second, scholars from non-research-intensive institutions have been added to the board. Finally, the journal made substantial efforts to diversify the editorial board in terms of methodological approaches, now having more qualitative and mixed methods scholars than ever. The editors want SM to reflect the varying approaches to sociological research represented in the discipline and encourage submissions regardless of approach. The results of these efforts are beginning to pay off, with an increase in submissions that are not purely quantitative in nature and several promising papers in the pipeline. The goal of each of these efforts is not only to diversify the content of SM, but to diversify by the backgrounds of the scholars that submit to and review for the journal.
Journal Operations
For the entire year of 2023, 98 manuscripts were considered, 69 of which were new submissions, and 29 were resubmissions. Of the 69 new submissions, 32 were rejected without peer review and 37 were placed into the review process. Of the 37 manuscripts reviewed, 19 were rejected and 9 were invited to resubmit a revised manuscript, 4 were accepted subject to minor changes, 1 was withdrawn by the Author, and 4 are still pending.
The acceptance rate based on all the submissions and resubmissions in 2023 was 30.6%. The average number of weeks to decision was 6.7, an improvement of over a week compared to last year, ranging from 0.6 weeks for papers rejected without peer review, to 13.7 weeks for papers invited to revise and resubmit, to 13.7 weeks for papers rejected after review, and an average of 15.5 weeks for papers accepted subject to minor changes.
Sociological Methodology continues to benefit from the ease of the ScholarOne online manuscript tracking system for all new and revised submissions. We currently have a relatively healthy flow of new and revised submissions.
Issue 1 of Volume 54 came out in February 2024. In preparation for Volume 54(2), many of the manuscripts are in copyediting or production.
David Melamed and Mike Vuolo, Editors
Sociological Theory
2023 has been the last year of my editorship at Sociological Theory. I have been in charge of new submissions until August, when the new (and excellent) editorial team took over new submissions, while I have ushered the existing papers until the end of the calendar year. In terms of submissions and decisions, the volume has been consistently high—about 20% up from 2022, with 155 new submissions (compared to 127 in 2022).
We have published 18 papers in 2023, up from 16 in the previous year. Our acceptance rate has been around 11.2 percent, a little higher than in previous years.
Continuing from last year, our aim (mine and the new team’s) was to shorten the time to first decision on manuscripts that are sent to review. I am happy to report that we continue to make strides in that regard, as the time to first decision has gone down to 46 days on average—under two months. I have a made special effort to reduce time to decision for graduate student submissions and the submissions of assistant professors, who are have facing time-pressures due to job-market and tenure processes.
Along those lines, and like previous editors, I have continued to desk-reject a large number of submissions, when I thought that either the fit was problematic, or that there was an extremely low chance that the manuscript would pass peer-review. While this is not a welcome outcome, I continued to make it a priority to return these desk-rejections as fast as possible, and to try and write constructive feedback that would allow authors to either re-work their paper for submission at Sociological Theory at a later date, or to submit their work to a more appropriate journal. The average time to receive such desk rejection remains stable from last year, at 11 days.
As in previous years, one of the issues plaguing ST is its composition of authors, skewing male. At the level of the editorial board, 67% is now female-presenting (23 of 33). I have also sustained the push to include people of diverse backgrounds in the editorial board. The percent of non-male authors this year has gone up, with 7 of the 18 papers having been written by women. We have also published a special issue about the work of Dorothy Smith in the calendar year, centering the theoretical importance of her work.
Finally, I would like to deeply thank the reviewers who made this work possible, and who engaged with the submissions to ST last year, as well as the members of the editorial board, who have done above and beyond to review, and provide advice on multiple occasions. I also extend my deep (very deep), gratitude to ST’s continuing managing editor, Joe Wiebe. His organizational acumen, institutional memory, and care, saved me from many errors. I am excited to see the journal in the capable hands of the new editorial team, and wish them the best.
Iddo Tavory, Editor
Sociology of Education
Sociology of Education remains a healthy and vibrant context for sociology of education scholarship. Sociologists of education draw on diverse theories, methods, and epistemological approaches to work related to education inside and outside the United States. As co-editors, we’ve sought to publish manuscripts on a broad range of issues of import to sociologists of education. We’ve continued to publish qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method scholarship that reflects the eclectic but connected mix of scholarship in this area. As editors, we’ve benefitted from an invested core of reviewers who have written constructive and helpful reviews, and we are thankful to each of them.
Manuscript Flow
This report covers the journal’s manuscript activity from January 1, 2023, through December 31, 2023. As the table shows, we continue to receive a large number of submissions. This year, we received 223 total manuscripts, including 190 new submissions. The average time from submission to decision was 12.6 weeks.
SOE’s overall acceptance rate – the number of unconditionally accepted articles in 2023
(18) divided by the number of final decisions was 7.8 percent. In 2023, the Revise and Resubmit rate declined to 15.5% from 23.6% in 2022.
During 2023, the time from manuscript submission to the delivery of a decision increased by one week. In 2022, we added four additional deputy editors to expedite the review process. While the time increased slightly this year, we anticipate streamlining these processes will reduce our time to decision in 2024. Our production lag time in 2023 (the average time from acceptance to print publication) was 4.9 months.
Editorial Team
As editors, we have continued to benefit from our managing editor, Shannon Vakil’s experience and deep knowledge of the editorial process. Her editorial expertise is essential to our ongoing work. We also want to acknowledge our eight deputy editors: Regina Deil-Amen, William J. Carbonaro, Patrick Denice, Jennifer C. Lee, Carla Dawn O’Connor, Susanna Loeb, Anthony A. Peguero, and Douglas David Ready. As deputy editors, they help us make difficult decisions based on their specific expertise. The four new deputy editors we added last year (incoming co-editor Bill Carbonaro, Patrick Denice, Jennifer C. Lee, & Douglas Ready) have helped us more efficiently process manuscripts through the editorial process.
We thank our outgoing Editorial Board members for their outstanding service to the journal: Pamela R. Bennett, Chase Michael Billingham, Dennis J. Condron, Renée DePalma Ungaro, Liliana M. Garces, ChangHwan Kim, and Kelly Welch.
In 2023, SOE welcomed several new members to the board: Bianca Jontae Baldridge, Patricia Bromley, Julia Burdick-Will, Carson Byrd, Kimberly Ann Goyette, Jason F Jabbari, Michela Musto, and Natasha Warikoo.
Reviewers and Reviewing
We sincerely thank all of those who reviewed for SOE in 2023. We continue receiving a large volume of annual submissions, and we could not handle this without our committed reviewers. This year, we will also acknowledge a group of outstanding reviewers with the “Revise and Resubmit” (Reviewers of the Year) award at our annual meeting.
Diversity and Inclusion Efforts
As editors, we have worked to make sure we consider diversity in our editorial processes. We have participated in ASA journal editors’ convenings on diversity and brought our best knowledge to bear on these conversations. We’ve also used our professional networks to identify a diverse editorial board across multiple dimensions of difference. In 2023, the editorial board comprised 53 percent women, 42 percent men, and 6 percent who did not identify with either of those categories. With regard to race and ethnicity, 53 percent of the board members identified as members of minoritized groups, and 42 percent identified as white. Finally, we’ve engaged in outreach activities to engage a broader set of actors in the discipline.
Summary
Serving as SOE co-editors has been an honor and a humbling experience. We believe that SOE continues to be a valued venue that scholars count on for rigorous, vital scholarship related to the sociology of education. We believe that the papers we’ve published reflect the broad substantive interests, theoretical tools, and methodological approaches that characterize the sociology of education. We encourage our colleagues, at all stages of their career trajectories, to continue sending your manuscripts to SOE.
John Diamond and Odis Johnson, Jr., Editors
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Manuscript Submissions
In 2023, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity received 327 submissions, an increase of 21 submissions from the previous year. This marks a 9.5% increase from the total submissions in 2022. Most of the submissions (n=319) were original research articles. In addition to original research submissions, the journal received 8 pedagogical articles in 2023. The average timespan between manuscript submission and acceptance was approximately seven (7) weeks. In addition to Original Research and Pedagogy articles, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity received and published 48 Book Reviews.
In 2023, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity accepted 27 of 327 submissions, resulting in an acceptance rate of just under 8.2%. This is a decrease of .8% in comparison to accepted manuscripts in 2022. The editorial team is satisfied with this acceptance rate. The lower rate tracks with the increased number of submissions, which has resulted in an increase in submissions that are either not an appropriate fit for the journal or require significant work before warranting peer review.
One aspect that the editorial team prides itself on is finding qualified peer reviewers for each submission. In general, we have worked to increase the number of qualified peer reviewers by (1) extending requests to scholars not previously in the journal’s network of reviewers; (2) extending requests for peer review to scholars from institutions where peer review is more valued (e.g. community college faculty, faculty at institutions with lower research output expectations, etc.); and (3) extending requests to non-US based scholars. This latter step is also aligned with our expressed aim to increase Sociology of Race and Ethnicity’s international reach and audience.
Like other academic journals, we have found it more difficult this past year to secure an adequate number of peer reviewers in a timely fashion. For instance, it is now routine to need to extend ten or more review invitations to secure just three reviewers. We believe the American Sociological Association, and other scholarly and professional organizations, need to have more open, honest, and transparent discussions about this ongoing dilemma. We will do what we can from our limited position to continue to encourage our colleagues to serve as peer reviewers, and to encourage timely reviews so that authors can receive timely decisions on their manuscripts. Given the constraints the entire academic journal publishing world faces, we are especially proud of our past year’s work.
Editorial Board
Our current editorial board is comprised of members of varied gender identities and expressions, race, and ethnicities. The 2023 editorial board reflects 13 men (31%), 26 women (62%), and 3 members (7%) who identify as gender nonconforming. Of the total number of editorial board members, 33 are scholars of color (79%).
DEI Plan for 2024
Founding editors David L. Brunsma and David G. Embrick made diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) central pillars of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Current co-editors B. Brian Foster and James M. Thomas continue to build upon their enormous and important efforts. The makeup of the SRE editorial board affirms the intersection of individual and organizational identities and helps ensure we have a transformational community of scholars. Additionally, the makeup of the SRE editorial board affirms a stance meant to address the social, systemic, and institutional barriers faced by members of our communities. SRE editorial board members help to create and cultivate a scholarly outlet that promotes inclusivity, and affirms a diverse range of voices, identities, and experiences. Coeditors B. Brian Foster and James M. Thomas remain committed to ensuring that SRE continues to serve as an important scholarly outlet for underrepresented scholars and cutting-edge scholarly content.
Brian Foster and James M. Thomas, Editors
Socius
Review Process
Socius, an open access journal, is an outlet for innovative, rigorously reviewed scholarship that spans sociology subfields and provides free and rapid access to users across the world. We aim to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed research online.
Socius received 491 total manuscripts in the calendar year 2023. Of the 357 new submissions, we desk-rejected 119. Of the 238 reviewed new submissions, we accepted 2, offered 44 minor and 95 major revisions, and rejected 93. Of the 134 revised manuscripts submitted, we accepted 120, offered 12 minor and 1 major revisions, and rejected 1. Our desk reject rate is higher than many print journals; however, two important objectives for Socius are a quick turnaround (from submission to publication) and limited rounds of revision—almost all of our revisions are subject to a single round. Both of these goals are intended to respect the time of authors and reviewers, to move promising papers through the review process more efficiently, and to avoid spending inordinate reviewer and editor time on manuscripts that are unlikely to be published. We have been very successful at this goal. The table below lists the time in review for each paper for all submitted manuscripts.
| Accepted | 2.4 weeks |
| Revise and Resubmit (Minor) | 7.7 weeks |
| Revise and Resubmit (Major) | 9.5 weeks |
| Rejected immediately | 3.2 weeks |
| Rejected after review | 8.5 weeks |
We continue to work closely with reviewers to convey that our review process is intended to be slightly different from the traditional process. We make clear that we seek to review manuscripts thoroughly and with high standards, however, turning papers around quickly requires that reviewers complete reviews more efficiently than typical for many other journals. To accomplish this, we send potential reviewers a detailed invitation including information on our goals and evaluation criteria. We explain that we will not forward papers to be reviewed if the work is obviously not up to current social science standards of writing or analysis; we prefer short, clear evaluations of papers rather than developmental review; and we seek clear recommendations to authors and editors. We also explain that we use four criteria for review: accuracy, novelty, interest, and presentation (i.e., quality of writing and organizing). We have been pleased that our reviewers typically follow these guidelines and have offered timely, high-quality, focused reviews.
The online format in which Socius is published means that papers are not restricted by print page limits or traditional manuscript format. We can, for example, easily accommodate papers that do not follow the traditional structure (introduction, theory, methods, etc.), include multiple color figures, have various linked appendices, or other departures from traditional print format.
Visibility and Successes
We have continued to attract and publish high-quality papers and have provided authors and reviewers a straightforward publication experience. This has resulted in high quality manuscripts that garner significant attention. Socius has 3 of the top 10 most downloaded articles from the fourteen ASA journals in 2023.
During the past four years the relatively quick publication process that is at the heart of Socius as well as the open science model on which Socius rests have proved particularly important in disseminating timely information about the coronavirus pandemic. We have collected COVID-19 related articles and data visualizations under a special collection featuring over 50 articles to date. Together this research on COVID-19 has been viewed and downloaded well over 100,000 times.
We have continued to build our special collection of Data Visualizations. During the past year we accepted 31 visualizations for publication. Our goal is to represent the growing field of visual social science and to give authors an opportunity to display important sociological findings in a creative, efficient, visual format. We recommend that visualization submissions include two parts. The main article will be a single figure (i.e., something that could be viewed on a single screen/page) and approximately 500 words (excluding caption and references) of expository text that highlights what is interesting and important about the figure. In addition, we recommend that authors include a supplementary information file that contains details about the data and methods used to generate the figure.
In 2024 we will be adding a special collection of papers featuring sociological research on artificial intelligence.
Range of Submissions
The topics of manuscripts submitted to Socius have been wide-ranging, reflecting the diverse ideas and issues studied by sociologists. We have received papers from nearly all sociological subfields and using various forms of argument and analysis. We hope that this substantive diversity continues to expand and encourage submissions drawn from the wide range of available sociological tools and topics.
Editorial Board, Reviewers, and Staff
We have a strong and diverse editorial board. Having a three-editor model has allowed us to expand and vary our editorial board in terms of expertise, methodological approach and representation. Our board is more equitably gendered than it has been historically. We will continue to diversify the board across a range of measures. While constrained by the limited demographic information provided to us by ASA, we have made a concerted effort to diversify the editorial board in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, seniority and type of institution. Our 2023 board is one of the most diverse on all of these characteristics among all ASA journals.
The Socius staff is fairly lean. We have four Editorial Associates, graduate students who give papers a first read, help to decide whether to review or desk reject papers, and identify possible reviewers as well as a Managing Editor who oversees the day-to-day operations of Socius.
Challenges
Of course, we still face important challenges. An ongoing challenge we have been working with is the impression that Socius is primarily a venue for quantitative, not qualitative papers. However, we are happy to report that there does some to be a shift in this perception. We are also hoping to expand comment sections and make it easier for authors to add supplementary material – all things that can be done in different scales and timeframes than is traditional. We are also exploring ways to simplify the manuscript submission process in Manuscript Central and to encourage more of our authors to share data and code used in analysis.
Ryan Light, Aaron Gullickson, and C.J. Pascoe, Editors
Teaching Sociology
Teaching Sociology remains at the forefront of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in sociology. We continue to offer free virtual webinars (monthly webinars and smaller coffee and conversation discussions) on topics from articles recently published in Teaching Sociology that are relevant to individuals in higher education and others focused more on the teaching within the discipline of sociology. Topics this past year included teaching environmental sociology, teaching sociology for pre-medical students, teaching with Tik Tok, adopting open educational resources, and teaching by, for, and about first-generation and working-class people. We also offered webinars related to publishing in Teaching Sociology including writing and using reviews for the job market and scholarly teaching and multiple webinars on demystifying the publication process in Teaching Sociology. These webinars were attended by over 450 different individuals (significantly more watched the recorded webinars) including people from outside of the discipline of sociology, directors of centers for faculty development, and faculty of all ranks from graduate students to professor emeriti representing all institution types. A special effort was made to reach out to graduate students and faculty of underrepresented groups.
Under the editorship of Michele Lee Kozimor and with deputy editor Barbara Prince, Teaching Sociology Volume 51 (2023) published 47 works, including conversations (11), articles (12), notes (7), as well as book, film, podcast, and website reviews (17). The special issue A Class of Our Own: Teaching By, For, and About First-Generation and Working-Class People was published as the July 2023 issue. During the past year, due to the publication of another special issue and an increase in the quality of submissions, we used all the pages budgeted. We are now publishing more articles, notes, and conversations and slightly fewer book, film, and podcast reviews than in the past. Currently, most issues of the journal contain 6-7 articles, notes, and conversations, and 6-8 book, film, and podcast reviews. There are a healthy number of accepted or conditionally accepted manuscripts in the queue ready for the incoming editor, with 6 of the articles currently available online and waiting to be published in an upcoming print issue. The editor, deputy editor, and editorial board have worked to encourage submissions and increase the quality of submissions by holding free monthly virtual webinars and, when possible, conference sessions on a variety of topics, including demystifying the publication process for the journal.
The Teaching Sociology editorial team continues to work with the editorial team of the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology to create linkages between these two resources. Searches performed in TRAILS identify Teaching Sociology citations. A reciprocal arrangement began in Summer 2017, with citations for new TRAILS resources published in two three-page promotions in each issue of Teaching Sociology as an ongoing practice.
Manuscript Flow
In 2023, excluding reviews, 76 manuscripts were received (42 new manuscripts and 34 revised manuscripts). This total of manuscripts received does not include submissions to the guest edited special issue—Teaching and Learning a Humanistic Sociology. The submissions for this volume are slightly higher than last year which is encouraging. For new submissions, 7 percent were rejected without peer review. Most rejections were accompanied with guidance from the editor to encourage future submission of a manuscript that would have greater prospects of receiving favorable reviews, often requiring new data collection or more rigorous assessment efforts. Of those manuscripts sent for peer review, 0 were accepted unconditionally, 20 percent were accepted conditional on minor changes, 54.3 percent rejected but invited to revise and resubmit, and 8.6 percent were rejected outright. These statistics on acceptance and revision decisions are comparable to recent previous years. In the opinion of the editorial team, the quality of manuscript submissions has increased since the webinars were initiated.
The mean time from submission to decision for 2023 is nearly the same as 2022 despite the increased challenges faced with finding reviewers and with reviews taking longer to be submitted due to the many challenges teaching faculty are facing. The mean time from submission to first decision of all manuscripts submitted in 2023 was 9.5 weeks with revised manuscripts just over 8.1 weeks. For new manuscripts that were rejected without peer review, decisions occurred within 1 week of receipt.
Editorial Board
There were 43 members on the Editorial Board comprised of 56 percent women, 37 percent men, 7 percent gender-queer/gender-nonconforming/other, and 33 percent were minorities. Individual members of the editorial board commonly performed 4-5 reviews in 2023.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives
The free virtual Teaching Sociology webinars have been designed to build a community of teacher-scholars, make the publication process in Teaching Sociology more transparent, increase the quality of submissions, and provide mentoring and resources to underrepresented scholars. These webinars also attracted a more diversified pool of submissions to the journal from unrepresented scholars and a set of different topics. A special effort was made to reach out to graduate students and faculty of underrepresented groups. We advertise the monthly webinars on the journal’s Twitter (X) account, in various teaching and learning listservs, and through an email list of individuals interested in Teaching Sociology news that the journal maintains. Another initiative that was continued in 2023 was to work with teams of guest editors for the special issues allowing for more direct mentorship of the editing process for individuals from underrepresented groups. In 2023, this initiative included working with the guest editors for special issue A Class of Our Own: Teaching By, For, and About First-Generation and Working-Class People. In 2023, a new initiative was undertaken to further diversify the editorial board. In addition to taking recommendations for new editorial board nominations from the current board members, Teaching Sociology accepted self-nominations. A call for self-nominations was distributed through the Teaching Sociology email list. This initiative was found to be successful resulting in more high-quality self-nominations than open positions.
The editor expresses gratitude to the American Sociological Association for its continued support of her work and the journal. It is bittersweet to be the outgoing editor of Teaching Sociology after 10 years serving as both editor and deputy editor.
Michele Lee Kozimor, Editor
