How Journals Select Articles: The Manuscript Review Process in American Sociology

Main Article Content

Katerina Guba

Abstract

This review essay examines the manuscript review process at major American sociology journals. The expansion of the discipline in the 1960s–1970s, which was accompanied by a tightening of the academic job market, transformed journals into key arbiters of tenure decisions. For young authors, publication in major journals was an important distinction which many of them tried to get. Under such conditions journal editors felt enormous responsibility for enforcing a fair review process with obligatory double-blind peer reviewing of all—even obviously poor—manuscripts. Journal editors made great efforts to ensure that verdicts on the fate of the manuscripts were objective. This new, fair peer review process came at a price—not only in the form of heavier workloads for editors and reviewers, but also the intellectual price, whereby original and innovative manuscripts were surpassed by simply competent papers. In Russian.

Keywords

American Sociology, Scientific Journals, Manuscript Reviewing, Double-Blind Peer Review


Abstract 170 | PDF (Русский) Downloads 183 HTML (Русский) Downloads 20

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).