Dear Friends:
Happy New Year! It’s been quite an interesting 2023 here at the AJS. Today, I’d like to draw your attention to a special feature in the November 2023 issue (see the Trending page), and also to some minor changes in our instructions for authors and for reviewers that have come from some of the very productive debates about the use of preregistration in the social sciences. Our goal is to continue to respect the wide variety of forms of rigorous research in sociology while also learning how the reviewing system can incorporate emerging best practices.
Here’s to a great, or at least, nonheinous, 2024!
John Levi MartinEditor
Previous Letters:
2023
I am delighted to announce here the new website, and the mirrored documents at the University of Chicago Press, AJS web page. We will be using this space to help prospective authors, reviewers, and readers understand the AJS system, which we think is a very cool one and one that can play a very special role in the discipline. Most of what you’ll see here is us laying out clearly information about how we have long worked.
We also have more detailed information on how to prepare your manuscript and how to think about the review process. One change that will happen soon is that we will be asking authors about sharing code and/or data on our Dataverse account. If this isn’t relevant for your manuscript, don’t panic! It’s there for those who are using formal data analysis—not for, say, ethnographers. But since reviewers are increasingly interested in whether data are public, we’ll be asking you at time of submission, and passing that information (not the data) on to them. You can find out more about this in our Information for Authors area.
This space (“From the Editor”) will be used for informal communication, as well as making any other clarifications needed. Here’s to a great 2023!
John Levi Martin
Editor