THE LAST EDITOR'S NOTE

By Gary Alan Fine

Journals perch on the edge of a precipice. Imagine a job - a profession, we comfort ourselves - in which 90% of our work products are deemed unworthy. What a bunch of bozos we must be. Yet, this is the structural reality that journal editors face. With ten percent acceptance rates, our task is to figure out how to spurn our colleagues kindly and have them believe that our decisions are essential to protect the discipline. And it is my job, too. We fetishize rejection rates as guarantors of quality. Each year Social Psychology Quarterly is allocated 390 pages and we must make the best of it. In 2004, we published fifteen articles, the Cooley-Mead Address, and eight research notes. That year we considered some 200 manuscripts. Even if I chose only to publish one article from every member of my editorial board, I couldn't. I must make difficult choices.

Journals are a profit center for the American Sociological Association. The question that we must ask as members is whether profits from journals should fund other worthy goals or whether the page allocations to journals be increased, allowing the association to publish more. Rejection rates result from economic and political choices, not only from intellectual ones. These choices affect life chances. Each sociologist must consider whether ASA Council's priorities are their priorities.

These decisions are all the more difficult because they have scholarly and personal consequences. They publicize research traditions, justify grants, give jobs, and deny tenure. A diligent and ethical editor wants to discover talent, nurture colleagues, and make friends - and in three years has fewer than fifty slots to do so. Sheesh!

Social psychology has a special challenge. Given that our colleagues perceive our specialized research programs as apart from the disciplinary heart, publication in generalist journals may be more challenging than for some in other specialties. Social Psychology Quarterly is one of the few journals in which sociological social psychologists know that their research will receive a fair hearing and an attentive audience.

Editors have choices. One can simply wait for articles, publishing those with the best reviews. Such a strategy seems obvious, no? This style of editing produces a journal for authors. What articles receive high marks? Often they are works of glossy competence in well-established, consensual research areas - Thomas Kuhn's normal science. Articles that are controversial often meet with contentious reviews. I want a journal for readers. My goal is to publish articles that colleagues wish to -- need to -- read. Controversy is essential for scholarly progress. A journal for readers and one for authors will not look all that different; we lack many degrees of freedom and no editor should lightly reject an article that all reviewers respect. However, given a choice between an article with a large potential impact and a narrow gauged one, or between an article that speaks to a broad swath of microsociologists and one that appeals to a few, I'll choose the former over the latter. For those aggrieved, advice is simple: take a deep breath, and in three years I'll be gone. Rotating editors are a blessing. And some day -- perhaps someday soon -- we will be e-publishing what we want without constraints of bandwidth.

Readers may notice other changes. Because of our page limits, I encourage authors to be concise. To this end, I am eliminating the label of Research Note. It is a perverse incentive for short articles to be second-class. We will publish short articles and longer ones, and perhaps a few very long ones. I set no upper limit for articles, as long as they justify their length. I will try experiments, such as including photographs on the cover with a brief explanation of their social psychological significance, sponsoring debates on topics of concern in the journal, recruiting essays on major books, and publishing brief essays on pedagogical techniques.

We must write to underscore the joys of sociology. Social psychologists with their ongoing research agendas often use technical terms. Linguistic specificity is inevitable in high-end science. However, writers must speak to large number of readers, especially in abstracts. Explain what is at stake in the article. How does this stuff matter? To this end, I encourage authors to shorten their literature reviews, nodding to the past, and increase the richness of their discussions, pointing to the future.

Reviewers and editors are teachers. I exhort our reviewers to operate by the principle of two in two: two pages of comments returned in two weeks. This will not always apply, but it underlines that articles are to be treated with respect. Most articles deserve admiration, and this is true for works by graduate students as well as by endowed professors. Writing reviews is part of our pedagogic mission. I asked Jane McLeod and Lisa Troyer (of Indiana and Iowa) to serve as deputy editors, providing advice after reviews arrive. They are not mere super-reviewers, but are action editors, whose advice I rely upon in making a decision.

Many revise-and-resubmit decisions are misguided. In most cases I shall give R&Rs only when I can visualize an acceptable article. I will avoid those R&Rs that will be sent to an entirely new set of reviewers. No double jeopardy. As long as I am convinced that an article can be published, I do not object to two or three R&Rs, as long as changes are productive. I hope for the outcomes of R&R to become closer to 80% positive, not a 50-50 coin toss. This means that what might otherwise have been R&Rs will now be rejected. I may reject some articles without prejudice, permitting authors to resubmit after major changes if they choose, recognizing that they will have new reviewers, but the same editor.

Journals are information delivery systems. They are the means through which we learn what's up. Books have solidity. They are collectibles, objets d'art. Journals, relentlessly filling our shelves, are less so, especially now that we can click and print the latest collegial auguries. We must confront the hegemony of paper. In a decade, journals will be recalled with the nostalgia we reserve for phonographs, typewriters, and any encyclopedia not named wiki. In digital space, the politics of publication will change. We can publish what we wish, not only what we can.

For now we have created an SPQ website, attached to the American Sociological Association's portal (www.asanet.org). Bookmark the site! Check it often. Kasia Kadela will serve as the journal's pioneering webmaster. There you will find my editor's notes, supplementary materials (appendices, tables, additional data) from authors, discussions of articles, and linkages to other sites of interest. Perhaps we will someday be able to publish replications on line. To start I have selected two pieces for discussion, Douglas Harper's photographic essay and Jessica Collett's concise pedagogic discussion, "Goffman in Bed." These discussions will be moderated, but moderation will be moderate. Criticism is welcome. We will also set up a third discussion for debate about the journal and journal policy, including this editor's note. The authors and I will participate in these discussions.

In time the website should become integral to the running of the journal. While we begin with supplementary material, at some point we can include more material (methodology, reliability checks, long field note extracts, replications conversation transcriptions), using the space of the journal for broad and provocative analyses. Perhaps at some point a brave and tenured member of our micro-tribe will agree with ASA's blessing to have her article placed only on the website with appropriate publicity in the journal. At this point, no two-tier acceptance policy is contemplated.

The future is coming, a statement as banal as has ever been published in these pages. Yet, banal or not, we must be prepared.

In addition to Deputy Editors Jane McLeod and Lisa Troyer, Corey Fields is the journal's graduate assistant, Kasia Kadela is website manager, and Gianna Barbera is the journal's managing editor and copy editor. I have combined the two positions. I want an active copy editor, and want that position filled in our Northwestern office. Her requests are my demands.

As a student of Anna Freud, Erving Goffman, Philip Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Tom Pettigrew, Harold Garfinkel, Jane Piliavin, Klaus Scherer, Harvey Sacks, and Robert Freed Bales, I adore the wit and wisdom of our field. In this, SPQ is Social Psychology Quarterly: The Journal of Microsociologies.