scholarly journals Report on Peer Review of Scholarly Journals in the Social Sciences and Related Fields

2010 ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heinz-Dieter Meyer

Abstract At present, institutional design is an under-theorized and underdeveloped part of the social sciences. In this paper I focus on designs for situations of collective action where the outcome is controlled by the choices of several self-interested actors. In those situations the goal of institutional design is to alter the rules of the game so that self-interested actors find it rational to cooperate. I explore the viability of that definition by considering two examples of institutional design: urban safety and academic peer review. I discuss the implications of my findings for our conception of rational self-interest and propose that three design principles – publicity, boundaries, and contiguity – can be inferred from the analysis.


Author(s):  
Eline Vandewalle ◽  
Raf Guns ◽  
Tim C. E. Engels

This article presents an analysis of the uptake of the GPRC label (Guaranteed Peer Reviewed Content label) since its introduction in 2010 until 2019. GPRC is a label for books that have been peer reviewed introduced by the Flemish publishers association. The GPRC label allows locally published scholarly books to be included in the regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities which is used in the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Ten years after the start of the GPRC label, this is the first systematic analysis of the uptake of the label. We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our two main data sources are the Flemish regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities, which currently includes 2,580 GPRC-labeled publications, and three interviews with experts on the GPRC label. Firstly, we study the importance of the label in the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Secondly, we analyse the label in terms of its possible effect on multilingualism and the local or international orientation of publications. Thirdly, we analyse to what extent the label has been used by the different disciplines. Lastly, we discuss the potential implications of the label for the peer review process among book publishers. We find that the GPRC label is of limited importance to the Flemish performance-based research funding system. However, we also conclude that the label has a specific use for locally oriented book publications and in particular for the discipline Law. Furthermore, by requiring publishers to adhere to a formalized peer review procedure, the label affects the peer review practices of local publishers because not all book publishers were using a formal system of peer review before the introduction of the label and even at those publishers who already practiced peer review, the label may have required the publishers to make these procedures more uniform.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (8-9) ◽  
pp. 955-961
Author(s):  
Esther Oliver ◽  
Andrea Scharnhorst ◽  
Joan Cabré ◽  
Vladia Ionescu

The Social Impact Open Repository (SIOR) has become a unique data source at the international level in which researchers can display, quote, and store the social impact of their research results. SIOR arises from the social and political needs to know and connect with scientific projects to assess their social impact, promoting transparency of science and open-access systems. This repository has been designed to allow researchers to link their social impacts with research institutions and citizens. In short, SIOR reveals possibilities for transforming scientific research through means such as developing a qualitative tool as an egalitarian scientific agora that enables assessment of social improvements derived from social sciences and humanities (SSH) research. SIOR is a qualitative and open peer-review tool that allows citizens to comment online about an investigation’s impact on society.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Wilm

Scholarly communication is undergoing a revolution with the move to open access. This has opened new opportunities and also new challenges. One of the most problematic issues are the costs of publishing. Some of this may be excessive profits of some publishers, but another part are actual costs associated with typesetting and document conversion.In 2012, the open source Fidus Writer editor was born with the vision of creating a fully web-based semantic editor for academics that would not require manual typesetting after the authors are finished with their text. Since 2015 the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and University of Bonn have been working on the “Open Scholarly Communications in the Social Sciences” project. The project is financed by the German Research Foundation, DFG, and it has been enhancing Fidus Writer and connecting it with a number of other tools, such as citation databases for automatic citation retrieval and the Open Journals Systems (OJS) to offer an integrated peer-review process. The aim is to create a fully integrated system for social Scientists and others that does away with conversion steps and makes scientific text creation both less costly and improves the tools available, also for non-technically inclined users.While several other projects have come into being simultaneously with Fidus Writer, their focus has been somewhat different: ShareLatex/Overleaf have focused on LaTeX users and is therefore not suitable for scientists who do not code. Other editors are either not open source, not working as collaborative editors or do not provide the tools needed by humanists and social scientists.We have written several papers collaboratively using our combined tool that have been submitted and published and are now working with two journals to obtain real-world experience using Fidus Writer with social scientists in the journal peer review process. In this poster I would like to present the current status of our tool and project.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Luis Barbosa dos Santos

PurposeWhen a concept is diffusely defined or, as this article argues, “taken for granted”, it becomes very difficult to track such concept on the literature and have some continuity as researchers build on top of previous results. This article proposes a definition for user-generated content, a term that though has lost some saliency, stands in the center or the social media phenomenon, so it should not be disregarded as an object of study.Design/methodology/approachCelebrating 20 years of the concept, this research performs a multidisciplinary literature review of 61 academic articles on UGC. Through deconstruction of the acronym UGC, it builds on the present converging, conflicting and diverging definitions and/or approaches to UGC on an attempt to consolidate a broader definition that encompasses the complexities of the phenomenon in a context of consolidation of social media, to be applied to social sciences.FindingsFollowing the present analysis, UGC is defined as any kind of text, data or action performed by online digital systems users, published and disseminated by the same user through independent channels, that incur an expressive or communicative effect either on an individual manner or combined with other contributions from the same or other sources.Originality/valueThis is the first academic effort that aims to create an in-depth dialogue over the different approaches to UGC across disciplines on the social sciences field. It should help reignite interest in the acronym, which got somehow eclipsed by the broader field of social media; whilst without UGC, social media would not exist or would not have the same social impact it does in its current form. Analogously, UGC as a topic of research has been deeply affected by the emergence and consolidation of Social Media. As this debate evolves, this contribution should be helpful as a reference to operationalize UGC on future research.Peer reviewThe peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0258


2008 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Donald Norris ◽  
Benjamin A. Lloyd

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of articles on the subject of e-government that were published in refereed scholarly journals through the end of 2004 to serve as a baseline for future analysis of this emerging field. They found over 100 e-government articles, but only 57 with empirical content. The authors then examined the articles using 12 analytical categories. They conclude that the scholarship about e-government comes primarily from the United States, and from authors trained in the social sciences. Few e-government articles adequately used the literatures that were available (e.g., IT and government, e-government, or any specialized literatures), and few created or tested theory or hypotheses. Articles employed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, but many contained conclusions that were not supported by their data or analyses. The authors conclude that e-government research is a young and growing field that has yet to achieve adequate scholarly rigor.


1983 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Nelson ◽  
A. R. Buss ◽  
M. Katzko

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Vlaeminck

>> See video of presentation (19 min.) In economics - as in many other branches of the social sciences- collaboratively working on data and sharing data is not very common, yet. This is also reflected in the professions’ journals, where policies on data management and data sharing currently exist for a small minority of journals only.I would like to introduce the presentation with some empirical results of a survey, in which economists working for the project EDaWaX (European Data Watch, a project funded by the German Research Foundation) analysed the data sharing behaviour of 488 US and European applied economists. Subsequently we give an overview on data policies of journals in economics and business studies. In the course of the EDaWaX project, the data policies in a sample of more than 300 economics journals have been analysed. The talk suggests guidelines for data policies aiming to foster replication of published research and presents some characteristics of journals equipped with those data policies as well as the status quo in disseminating underlying research data of empirically based articles.Against this analytical background the talk identifies some challenges associated with the current e-infrastructure for providing publication-related research data by journals. The presentation also shows a technical solution for some of these challenges. In particular, the talk presents a pilot application for a publication-related data archive for scholarly journals in the social sciences, which has been developed in the first funding phase of the EDaWaX-project. The aim of this open source tool is to empower editors of scholarly journals to easily manage research data for empirically based articles in their journals. The application mainly targets open research data but is also capable of interlinking data and publications even in the case of confidential or proprietary data.In conclusion the talk outlines the further development of our application and sketches other tasks of the project’s second funding phase.More information on the project is available on www.edawax.de  


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 96-97
Author(s):  
James R. Welch

With the recent multiplication of traditional and electronic venues for publishing in ethnobiology, the social sciences, the life sciences, and related fields, it is increasingly important that authors practice self-diligence to ensure that the contents of their publications meet criteria of veracity and ethical soundness. Although the peer-review process encourages high standards, it is an insufficient means for verifying the ethical worthiness of most publications. The ethical merits of published research derive from a cumulative process including formulating a research design, obtaining permissions, collecting and analyzing data, and finally composing and submitting a manuscript. Unfortunately, there is no failsafe ethical gatekeeper at any stage of the process. The importance of ethical publishing is all the more important in the field of ethnobiology, as professionals in the field  often cross the intellectual and methodological boundaries between disciplines, and their research often involves multiple stakeholders in widespread jurisdictions.


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