Background & Data Sources

• In the summer of 2000, in response to a controversy over the appointment of a new editor for the American Sociological Review (ASR), then ASA President Joe Feagin recommended, and with the support of ASA Council, established a 14-member ASA Task Force on Journal Diversity (TFJD) to examine issues of diversity, broadly defined, in ASA journals.
  
  
• Major issues examined by the TFJD included the relevance of ASA publications to members' interests, whether ASA publications are too narrow in focus, whether certain methodological approaches and substantive areas are under-represented among published articles, and whether certain kinds of individuals are under-represented among the ranks of authors, editorial boards and editors.
  
  
• TFJD members met for the first time on Sunday, 13 August at the 2000 Annual Meetings held in Washington, D.C., followed by a Monday, 14 August, Open Forum to solicit input from the membership. Additional input from members was also solicited via a call published in the September issue of Footnotes.
  
  
• Initial TFJD efforts focused on a review of a previous ASA-sponsored 1996 report that compared published articles appearing in the American Sociological Review (ASR) and the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) over a one-year interval.
  
  
• Informed by this report and member input from the previous Open Forum and Call for materials, four basic issues, each examined by separate sub-committees, were identified for more in-depth study. These included Journal Content, The Publication Process, Outreach Strategies, and Career Placement of Authors.
  
  
• Data examined by each of the four sub-committees included: 1) Input from the membership; 2) Archival data on membership, editors and subscriptions from ASA; 3) ASA Journal Editor's Reports from 1990 - 2000; 4) additional information on ASR provided by the current editors (Camic and Wilson); 5) Personal interviews conducted with former ASA publications editors and editors of other social science journals; 6) Other relevant information provided in publications and works-in-progress; and 7) a content analysis of articles published in ASR and AJS, section membership and dissertation topics in two large departments.

Concerns of the Membership

• ASA members reported a set of persistent perceptions. For example, while it appeared that concerns for relevance and inclusion had brought about improvements in ASA committee memberships and in "specialty journals", similar improvements were not noted with regard to the ASR.
  
  
• Particular concerns noted by members included: 1) a perceived exclusion of articles by sociologists conducting multi-disciplinary, policy-based, or practice-oriented research; and 2) whether qualitative studies can find an outlet in ASR given pressures to reduce article length.
  
  
• Analyses of subscriptions to ASA journals indicate that the percentage of members of the ASA subscribing to the ASR has declined from 80% to 50%. CS has also declined from 50% to 30%. In fact, most ASA journals have experienced a slight downward trend. Sociological Methodology and Sociological Theory have remained stable while only Teaching Sociology has experienced an increase.
  
  
• Analyses of archival data on ASA editors indicate that:
  
  
  1. across the entire set of ASA journal editors (N=115), about one-quarter have been women, with two-thirds of these editors being appointed on or after 1990;
     
     
  2. the proportion of ASA journal editors that have been women across the "run" of each journal ranges from a low of 0% (Sociological Theory) to 41.7% (Sociology of Education);
     
     
  3. for most ASA journals, women became editors fairly late in the journal's run with the exception of SOE, JHSB and the Rose Monograph Series which had both named women editors by the early 1980's;
     
     
  4. the most dramatic shift in gender profiles occur in SPQ with a historical representation of 26.7% women editors over its run, to 80% in the most recent decade;
     
     
  5. diversity on race/ethnicity falls far behind that of gender. Across all ASA journals only .6% of editors have been or are sociologists of color;
     
     
  6. there have been 2 African-American editors (the current co-editor of ASR and the 1973-1975 editor of JHSB), 3 Asian-Americans (1973-1975 SOE, the 1997-1999 TS, and one of the current co-editors of the Rose Monograph Series), and 1 Hispanic editor (1994-1997 JHSB).
     
     
• Analyses of Annual ASR Editor's Reports indicate that:
  
  
  1. the proportion of women reviewers has increased from roughly 20% in the early 1990s to roughly 35% the end of the decade. Similarly, the proportion of editorial board members who are women increased from 40% to 51% over this same interval;
     
     
  2. the proportion of editorial board members who are members of minority groups increased from the 8-10% range in the early 1990s, to nearly 30% by the end of the decade.
     
     
• Analyses of Annual Editor's Reports for other ASA journals (i.e., Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Contemporary Sociology, Sociological Theory, and Sociology of Education) document similar although somewhat attenuated upward trends in the representation of women and minorities on editorial boards and among reviewers.
  
  
• Review of data provided by the current ASR editors indicate that:
  
  
  
   
  1. there have been slight shifts (20-30%) in the representation of qualitative expertise on the editorial board of ASR with a significant increase (over 40%) under the current editors;
     
     
  2. between 2000 and 2002, approximately one-quarter of papers submitted to the ASR used qualitative approaches with about that same percentage of qualitative articles appearing in subsequent issues;
     
     
  3. the length of articles in the ASR has increased from an average of 14 to 19 pages during the period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s with a current average of 23 pages in a recent issue in 2002.
     
     

      
• Review of other data provided indicates that there appears to be no trend in the low representation of one type of qualitative work (ethnography, participant observation or fieldwork) in the AJS, ASR.
  
  
• Interviews with 8 former editors of ASA publications were conducted by the Process Subcommittee to determine how the process of assembling articles for publication affects representativeness and inclusion. Overall, these former editors felt that only modest changes in journal formats (i.e., including review articles, research notes, improving 'readability', etc.) were likely feasible.
  
  
• Former editors cautioned against improving representativeness and inclusion by increasing page lengths in ASA publications other than the ASR and JHSB.
  
  
• Less formal interviews were conducted with a number of editors of social science journals to determine what strategies editors use to encourage the submission of manuscripts that might not otherwise be submitted for review. Results of these interviews yielded a number of 'outreach' strategies, none of which appear to be particularly innovative or likely to yield desired improvements in representativeness or inclusion.
  
  
• These journal editors also indicated concerns regarding the 'fairness' of targeted 'outreach' efforts.
  
  
• A content analysis of the representativeness of the substantive areas covered in publications in the ASR and the AJS over a 10-year interval indicated that:
  
  
  1. on average, authors in these journals list 3.65 substantive areas of interest. Published articles, on the other hand, address 2.1 substantive areas in ASR articles, and 2.3 areas of interest in AJS articles;
     
     
  2. relative to members' stated areas of substantive interest, articles appearing in the ASR over-represent topics of gender and race. Somewhat lower levels of over-representation are also observed for articles in the areas of stratification, political sociology, economic sociology, development, organizations and public policy. Under-represented substantive areas include medical sociology, theory, methods and teaching. ASR articles in the areas of the sociology of education and social psychology appear to be roughly equivalent to members' declared substantive areas;
     
     
  3. articles published in the AJS present a somewhat different picture where a larger over-representation of articles in the areas of organizations and economic sociology is observed. AJS articles also have a lower representation of articles dealing with the two most commonly declared substantive areas - gender and race. Theory and medical sociology are proportionately represented among AJS articles.
     
     
• A content analysis of a convenience sample of doctoral dissertations completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Berkeley indicates that, with the exception of dissertations in the area of culture, dissertations in this sample broadly replicate the substantive areas of articles published in the leading sociology journals.
  
  
• Two broad classes of recommendations are offered:
  
  
  1. ASA evaluate current data collection efforts on journals and re-configure reporting requirements.
     
     
  2. ASA require Publications Committee to add considerations of diversity, broadly defined, to editor selection. Further that Publications Committee and journal editors consider the feasibility of new formats, increases in page allotments for select journals, and activities at the annual meetings that will increase the accessibility of journal submission and publication to a broad spectrum of its membership and be attuned to different career stages.