Author: PSJ Editorial Team

Tips From the Editors

We have previously discussed how authors should engage with the ongoing academic conversation in the journal in which they hope to be published. Our editors pointed out that good papers tend to incorporate and build upon the key questions and developments in the field. Here we address the logistics of manuscript processing.

Tip #2: Pay Attention to the Details

Academic journals get hundreds of submissions every year. Each paper that is submitted must be read and evaluated by a member of the editorial team. Editorial Associate Ben Galloway said, “I think one of the most important things I have learned as a part of the editorial team is the process behind manuscript processing and sorting-specifically.” There are several characteristics of a paper, aside from the quality of the writing and research, that are considered within this process.

Originality is always a top priority. Ensure that your work is your own. Any research from other scholars used in your work should be properly cited. Double-check that quotations and concepts are attributed to their original author and source. The same advice applies when you are referencing your own work!

Also make sure you submit an anonymized version of your paper, and pay attention to the journal’s instructions for authors, including style guidelines and word limit.

Finally, don’t forget the cover letter. Authors may underestimate the impression a well-written cover letter can have on the editorial team. “I always read cover letters very closely,” says Editor-in-Chief Geoboo Song. Use your cover letter as an opportunity to make a strong case for your paper to be published. Explain how your paper fits well in the journal and why your work will be of interest to its readers.

Tips From the Editors

Getting your research published can be a difficult and daunting task. We asked our editorial team to draw on their experiences as editors to offer some advice to scholars. In this ongoing series, we will compile, summarize, and relay our editorial team’s thoughts and observations with the goal of helping prospective authors as they prepare to submit their work for publication.

Tip #1: Engage with the Literature

Several members of our editorial team emphasized the importance of engaging with the existing literature. The works featured in PSJ are theory-driven pieces of policy research that often build upon one another. It is clear that the authors published in PSJ have incorporated the developments and key questions presented in the journal into their own work. It is imperative that researchers ask new questions and supply the community with new ideas; however, one must ensure that the questions and ideas presented fit into the scholarly conversation. As Associate Editor Gwen Arnold put it, “…it has to be a real conversation, not a monologue.”

A quick way to gauge how well you have participated in a journal’s academic conversation is to check your bibliography. For an article to sufficiently engage with the intellectual essence of a given journal, it should reference several works published in said journal. This will, of course, only give you a surface-level evaluation of how well the piece has incorporated the relevant literature. Associate Editor Holly Peterson points out that manuscripts can do a good job at drawing on previous developments and adding to the common themes and topics, but a particularly strong manuscript “builds these themes into the very thinking of the piece, not just in the framing of the research, but in its foundations, conceptualizations, and substantive findings.”

In summary, while drafting your article, consider how well you engage with a journal’s existing literature. Try to make this engagement obvious. Readers should be able to plainly see how your work adds to the ongoing conversation and understand how your research contributes to its progress. “Making the findings of the article clearly connected to ongoing conversations in the journal,” Associate Editor Aaron Smith-Walter says, “is an excellent way to elevate the chances that the piece finds a home in its pages.” Keeping this in mind before submitting your paper can help your work stand out and give it the nudge it may need to be on its way to publication.

Just and Equitable Citation

For many of us, the reference list we assemble at the end of a paper is one step above an afterthought: generated by citation management software, hopefully formatted correctly by the same. For me, the exception occurs if my paper exceeds the page or word limit for a journal I’m targeting. To avoid cutting precious text, I’ll comb through my citations, trying to find places where I could use one instead of three, getting rid of less-than-crucial examples, excising the “see also” and “e.g.” In a low moment a few years ago, wrestling with an unwieldy reference list, I actually tried to convince myself that nobody really needs their middle initial. That was when it dawned on me that citation is not a neutral practice. Collectively, our choices about who to include and exclude, and how and why, shapes our literature: who counts in it, and how much.

Other folks got the memo before me. A number of studies show that citations in political science journals tend to underrepresent female and minority scholars (Bruening and Sanders 2007; Dion et al. 2018; Dion and Mitchell 2020; Teele and Thelen 2017) as do journals in other disciplines (Bertolero et al. 2020; Caplar et al. 2017; Chatterjee and Werner 2021; Dworkin et al. 2020; Maliniak et al. 2013; Odic and Wojcik 2020; Roberts et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021). This phenomenon appears to be driven by some combination of:

Building a diverse, equitable, and vibrant community of policy scholars requires that we try to mitigate these biases. But how? Fundamentally we need major changes in how we train, hire, and support scholars, so that academia welcomes rather than erects barriers for women, minorities, non-traditional and first-generation scholars, and other groups subject to discrimination and bias. This should be shared goal we all strive to achieve. A small but actionable step forward is to consider explicitly the composition of our reference lists and, to the extent we find gender or racial imbalances, make a conscious effort to cite more scholarship by women and underrepresented minorities. We encourage all PSJ authors to take this step. Some tools to help in that assessment include:

PSJ has taken another small but nonetheless important step. In 2021, we stopped counting reference lists in the overall word count for an article. Limiting reference lists may cause authors to sacrifice newer scholarship, which may be produced by diverse scholars, in favor of older, core scholarship produced by less diverse authors. Our continuing aim is to eliminate this incentive.

Are there other steps that you would like to see PSJ or other political science or policy science journals take to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in our scholarly community? Do you have recommendations for how we as individual scholars can tackle this charge, or how we should approach it when acting collectively? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

-Gwen Arnold, Associate Editor

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Call for Papers: Special Issue on Policy Design

The Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) invites submissions for a Special Issue focusing on policy design in the policy process.

The Special Issue is intended to advance policy design research by exploring its connections to frameworks, theories, and models of the policy process in which policy design is implicitly or explicitly recognized but otherwise conceptually or empirically under- attended. Invited are papers that advance theory and methods for studying policy design, defined either as policy formulation or policy content.

As a collection, the Special Issue will be compiled to feature a range of papers that address a variety of theories, methods, and topical domains, which will help to enhance scholarly understanding of policy design throughout the policy process. The Editors hope to attract a diverse group of scholars who approach policy design from different perspectives and strongly encourage submissions from women, international, and minority scholars, broadly defined.

The deadline for submitting a manuscript for the Special Issue is January 19th, 2024.

Potential contributors to the Special Issue may participate in a “Peer Paper Exchange” in the fall of 2023 through which authors can obtain informal feedback from peers who also plan to submit a paper for the Special Issue and opt to participate in the Exchange. Each paper will be reviewed by 1-2 peers who will provide informal written feedback. Participation in the Exchange is intended to support the development of papers but has no bearing on the peer review process that will be undertaken by PSJ once papers are submitted to the Journal; that review process is formal and entirely independent of the “Peer Paper Exchange.”

To participate in the “Peer Paper Exchange,” please submit a one-page abstract that explains your research question, contribution of your paper to scholarship on policy design, and the data and methodological approaches you plan to use to answer your research question, along with the paper title and author information. This is due by August 11th. Notifications of acceptance to participate in the “Peer Paper Exchange” will be made by August 25th. Authors participating in the Exchange must share their draft papers with fellow Exchange participants by October 27th. Comments from the Exchange peer review will be returned to authors by November 17th.

To apply for the “Peer Paper Exchange,” please visit:

https://syracuseuniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5mNrL3SgtFOq6UK

Find more information in the full call for papers.

Welcome!

Greetings and welcome to the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) Blog! We are incredibly excited to use this digital space to help our authors extend the impact of their research, and to build a vibrant community of policy scholars, practitioners, and citizens at large.

The following posts serve two key goals. First, we will keep you updated on the latest developments at PSJ and within the policy process research community more broadly. Second (and more importantly), we will share short, accessible summaries of PSJ publications designed for experts, practitioners, and the general public. These posts will be promoted on our social media channels, and their respective articles will also be made open access for a limited period. We hope this blog will help our authors achieve greater exposure and recognition while also reducing barriers to top-quality, peer-reviewed policy research.

We extend our sincere appreciation to Dr. Saba Siddiki, Blog Editor, and Erica Ivins, Blog Managing Editor, for their current work on this initiative. We are also grateful to Senior Associate Editor Dr. Melissa Merry and former Editorial Assistant Eli Polley for their years of service in spearheading this endeavor.

We deeply value the views and insights of our authors and readers, and we are always excited to engage with the entire policy community. Together, let’s foster a robust environment for meaningful dialogue, collaboration, and innovation in the field of policy studies. Thank you for being an integral part of this effort. We look forward to continuing this intellectual adventure!

Sincerely,

The PSJ Editorial Team

Geoboo Song, Melissa K. Merry, Gwen Arnold, Saba N. Siddiki, Holly L. Peterson, Creed Tumlison, Eric Button, Benjamin Galloway, Camille Gilmore, Erica Ivins, Victor Kwaku Akakpo, Rinjisha Roy, Izehi Oriaghan, Annette Nyoni, Travis Wagher, Ryan Ramaker, Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, and Katherine McKinney