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Post by suggestion on Jul 28, 2011 12:17:51 GMT -5
I used to find the soc journals wiki to have some interesting information. It doesn't seem to get updated very often anymore. It seems like a useful place to keep track of/get a better sense of this sort of thing. www.wikihost.org/w/socijournals/start
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Post by aaaa on Jul 28, 2011 14:41:22 GMT -5
First, let me just post that I was really disappointed with my AJS experience. 7 months between submission and review. Of the 3 reviewers, 2 were fair and 1 was hostile (think "this whole subfield is bunk" as opposed to paper specific comments). After a round of revise and resubmit (another 6 months), we had 2 reviewers from the 1st round and one new reviewer. 1 reviewer from the first round clearly recommended an acceptance, the new reviewer suggested some fairly minor changes, and the hostile reviewer was back, this time dealing a bit more with the substance of the paper, but his or her comments on the statistical methods were simply, absolutely wrong and outdated. The result? A rejection. Obviously the editor gave significant weight to the comments by the hostile reviewer, and was unfamiliar with the statistical methodology to catch the mistakes.
Now, the reason that I say this is, besides venting, to warn people about only going for the top journals. Since we are all trained at r1s and the like, our professors sometimes will have this attitude of AJS/ASR/SF or bust that might be less than ideal for an early career sociologist.
Not to discourage anyone from applying to those top journals, but just to give a heads up that sometimes the process can take multiple years and the outcome isn't necessarily fair. To use a baseball analogy, sometimes people should settle for a single or a double, instead of going for a home run every time. Take the example above of the 2 asr R&Rs: maybe that person would have been better off with 1 asr r&r and one specialty publication in print.
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Post by yes on Jul 28, 2011 15:25:39 GMT -5
Now, the reason that I say this is, besides venting, to warn people about only going for the top journals. Since we are all trained at r1s and the like, our professors sometimes will have this attitude of AJS/ASR/SF or bust that might be less than ideal for an early career sociologist. Not to discourage anyone from applying to those top journals, but just to give a heads up that sometimes the process can take multiple years and the outcome isn't necessarily fair. To use a baseball analogy, sometimes people should settle for a single or a double, instead of going for a home run every time. Take the example above of the 2 asr R&Rs: maybe that person would have been better off with 1 asr r&r and one specialty publication in print. yes, yes, yes and yes. I have seen several careers ruined recently by this. Junior faculty being pushed and pushed to get these top pubs and then having almost nothing to show for themselves when it came time to go up for tenure because it's a long and not always fair process. Unless you truly are a rock star, it's really not wise to send *everything* to the top places.
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yep
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Post by yep on Jul 28, 2011 16:02:42 GMT -5
Let's all remember that the comments from the top journals are often useful, so the strategy of some people is to send there first, with the understanding that you won't necessarily get an R&R but that it would provide good comments for the submission to a 2nd journal. I don't deliberately do this myself, but have benefited from the strategy of incorporating comments from rejections to make the paper better before submitting it somewhere else.
This means that ultimately, you have to have to be careful to have more pieces in the pipeline, so that you can afford some slack for papers with slow reviews, and probably also to submit before you actually feel that it is perfect. However- don't think that smaller journals necessarily have faster review times. Often the bigger journals are better run and have a bigger pool of reviewers. You may as well fail fast.
As for hostile reviewers - that is the life! Sure, it stings to get these, but if one reviewer out of three thinks it is bunk, no doubt some of the readers will too. So that's actually good information for you to anticipate these kinds of arguments and maybe try to throw them a bone. Sure, there are some journals that try to pack in their friends, but most of the time, there is a pretty level playing field - everyone has to deal with crackpot reviewers sometimes. It sucks, but it's definitely not just you getting singled out.
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Post by aaaa on Jul 28, 2011 22:55:41 GMT -5
Oh, I am sure I wasn't being "singled out." My example, besides venting a little bit, was just to point out that just because a journal is tops in the field doesn't mean that its review practices are necessarily fair or quick (in my case, the reviewer was hostile to an entire subfield and had clearly outdated knowledge of the state of the art in a certain statistical technique).
Top specialty journals may not necessarily be faster, but they will often require fewer revisions, and will have editors and reviewers who are more likely to either be more familiar with the state of the art in a given subspecialty, or to at least share in some of the assumptions of the subfield, something that may not be the case on top generalist journals.
Again, this is not to dispute AJS/ASR place at the top, or to discourage anyone from submitting there. But given the lower acceptance rates and need to please a wider audience, unless you have a slam dunk of a paper, you should be aware that there is a good chance it may take a couple of years or more to get published, if at all. And that the more selective the publication, the more likely the particular whims of individual reviewers may affect the editorial decision one way or another.
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Post by derp on Aug 1, 2011 10:44:14 GMT -5
I used to find the soc journals wiki to have some interesting information. It doesn't seem to get updated very often anymore. It seems like a useful place to keep track of/get a better sense of this sort of thing. www.wikihost.org/w/socijournals/start I like this idea a lot, and maybe I'm a complete moron, but I can't figure out how to edit that wiki!
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Sociologist Who Studies Crime
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Post by Sociologist Who Studies Crime on Aug 1, 2011 11:28:50 GMT -5
"Demography, Criminology, Social Psychology Quarterly
These are important journals, but yes, they are subdiscipline journals with not nearly the audience of ASR, AJS, SF."
This statement is true if you are thinking of a purely Sociology department. If, for example, you are applying for a job in a Criminology/Criminal Justice department or a Demography department than Criminology or Demography might be and in my case is valued the same or higher than ASR or AJS. I am in a Criminology and Criminal Justice department that is separate from the Sociology department and my promotion and tenure documents give extra weight to Criminology and not ASR or AJS. Other Crim departments I know give equal weight to Criminology as they do AJS or ASR.
But it is also important to remember that as you move down the rankings of Universities publishing in "top tier" journals becomes less important and just publishing somewhere (hopefully a respectable place) is the job getting and job keeping publishing requirement.
My two anecdotal cents :P
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Post by advancedassistant on Aug 1, 2011 11:44:46 GMT -5
Don't forget, too, that Gender & Society is now ranked as the #4 journal in the discipline. So, in some instances, subdiscipline journals may have quite a lot of power. Whether or not individual departments recognize this power is another question...
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Post by Guest on Aug 1, 2011 20:42:14 GMT -5
Good search committees at good programs will actually read your articles and won't assume that because it's in a "top" journal it's actually good. Programs that want good scholars, read the scholarship!
The journal does matter since it's the first round of quality control, but we all know how political the process is. Everyone in our discipline knows (or should know) that some grad students from some programs (or grad students with good connections) get published a bit easier (and a little quicker) in some "top" journals, even when the actual work may be a little poor. This may help get these people employed (which is the point) and help maintain department prestige, but it's not going to get them a so-called "top" job.
Same goes with the proliferation of multiple author articles. Many grad students enter the market with no single-authored articles. Even if you're a first author (as a grad student), most people probably just think that you have a supervisor who is trying to help you out. I'd choose an applicant who has published on her own in a good journal over an applicant who published with her dissertation chair in the ASR or AJS.
In short, focus on the quality of your work. Sure you'll want to publish in the best journal possible, but there are many interesting and respectable ones. Personally, I rarely read AJS or ASR since most of the articles are boring as hell and don't tend to represent what I take to be the cutting edge in sociology. If I find one article a year worth reading in one of those journals, I'd be surprised. At the same time, I suppose if I thought I had a chance, I'd send an article for review to either one...
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frustrated at this reality
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Post by frustrated at this reality on Aug 2, 2011 7:44:27 GMT -5
Same goes with the proliferation of multiple author articles. Many grad students enter the market with no single-authored articles. Even if you're a first author (as a grad student), most people probably just think that you have a supervisor who is trying to help you out. I'd choose an applicant who has published on her own in a good journal over an applicant who published with her dissertation chair in the ASR or AJS. I know you aren't speaking from personal belief but rather experience with search committees, but I wish I could pull search committees aside and just scream at them: Who do you think did most of the work on that paper? the student or the faculty member? Of course it was the student. The faculty member might have had access to the data or proposed the original research question or written a chunk the student wasn't good at writing, but nine times out of ten, the less advanced person in a multiple authored paper is the one who did the bulk of the actual legwork.
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anon
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Post by anon on Aug 2, 2011 8:06:29 GMT -5
Sub-disciplines also differ regarding multiple authorship. It doesn't make any sense to penalize multiple author publications in demography or methods, in many cases, whereas that kind of critique may be more valid in subfields in which joint work is less common. Although as the previous poster pointed out, the student probably did the bulk of the work if they are first author.
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Post by some thoughts on Aug 2, 2011 9:19:57 GMT -5
Good search committees at good programs will actually read your articles and won't assume that because it's in a "top" journal it's actually good. Programs that want good scholars, read the scholarship! The journal does matter since it's the first round of quality control, but we all know how political the process is. Everyone in our discipline knows (or should know) that some grad students from some programs (or grad students with good connections) get published a bit easier (and a little quicker) in some "top" journals, even when the actual work may be a little poor. This may help get these people employed (which is the point) and help maintain department prestige, but it's not going to get them a so-called "top" job. Same goes with the proliferation of multiple author articles. Many grad students enter the market with no single-authored articles. Even if you're a first author (as a grad student), most people probably just think that you have a supervisor who is trying to help you out. I'd choose an applicant who has published on her own in a good journal over an applicant who published with her dissertation chair in the ASR or AJS. In short, focus on the quality of your work. Sure you'll want to publish in the best journal possible, but there are many interesting and respectable ones. Personally, I rarely read AJS or ASR since most of the articles are boring as hell and don't tend to represent what I take to be the cutting edge in sociology. If I find one article a year worth reading in one of those journals, I'd be surprised. At the same time, I suppose if I thought I had a chance, I'd send an article for review to either one... I believe the author is speaking from personal belief. This is why we have committees. Ultimately, the selection of the short list is a political process that relies on the opinions/expertise of the search committee. Like many things, there are systematic factors as well as stochastic ones, and the amount variance explained is somewhat limited. Committees help to smooth out the idiosyncratic beliefs of people, such as this person, who appears to be disinclined towards AJS and ASR. Here is my advice. Do you what you need to do to demonstrate/prove your research excellence. This may involve the following (more is better): 1) superior writing; 2) superior methods/analyses; 3) sole or first authorship; 4) multiple publications (like 3+); 5) publication in the big two/three or in top-tier specialty journals (the wider the readership the better e.g., Demography, JMF); and 6) a nonderivative dissertation project. In any event, take my advice with a grain of salt. I'm just one opinion too.
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Post by sc member on Aug 2, 2011 9:23:32 GMT -5
I know you aren't speaking from personal belief but rather experience with search committees, but I wish I could pull search committees aside and just scream at them: Who do you think did most of the work on that paper? the student or the faculty member? Of course it was the student. The faculty member might have had access to the data or proposed the original research question or written a chunk the student wasn't good at writing, but nine times out of ten, the less advanced person in a multiple authored paper is the one who did the bulk of the actual legwork. We (search committees) know that the first author did the bulk of the work. But there are a lot of "little things" involved in the process of getting a paper accepted that your advisor knows how to do that you haven't done yet. For example, an exhaustive review of the literature can take weeks and months. Crafting an innovative theoretical contribution might come in a flash during a talk over coffee. Any job applicant can do the former, not all can do the latter. In other words, we just want to know that you can do this stuff by yourself.
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Post by still frustrated on Aug 2, 2011 10:35:10 GMT -5
We (search committees) know that the first author did the bulk of the work. But there are a lot of "little things" involved in the process of getting a paper accepted that your advisor knows how to do that you haven't done yet. For example, an exhaustive review of the literature can take weeks and months. Crafting an innovative theoretical contribution might come in a flash during a talk over coffee. Any job applicant can do the former, not all can do the latter. In other words, we just want to know that you can do this stuff by yourself. That's a valid concern for a search committee, one that should be considered and explored. That said, I know that in two of my three co-authored pieces that have faculty members as co-authors(only one is published. fear not, fellow grad students on the market! lol), my main contribution was the "innovative theoretical contribution." For one, I did not have access to the data and we wanted to work together to keep in touch. For the other, the two graduate students went to the professor to see if s/he was interested in joining us on a paper because we knew s/he would really enjoy the paper and push us to actually get it done. But there's no way to prove that (or the opposite) on the CV except to have people as recommenders and hope they mention that. It seems like the benefit of the doubt should go to the student and the question of "who is really the innovator" should become clear when the student discusses plans for future work and/or his/her dissertation research.
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Post by sc member on Aug 2, 2011 10:43:10 GMT -5
But there's no way to prove that (or the opposite) on the CV except to have people as recommenders and hope they mention that. It seems like the benefit of the doubt should go to the student and the question of "who is really the innovator" should become clear when the student discusses plans for future work and/or his/her dissertation research. You're on the right track. Just make sure your letter writers mention it. I'll I was trying to say is that sc members have these concerns, and applicants should tailor their arguments to address them.
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