College of Social Sciences and Humanities profs play key roles in academic journals across fields

Across the University of Alberta’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH), faculty members are hard at work. Throughout the year, they pore over submitted manuscripts, provide peer review, sit on editorial boards and perform various vital tasks in the operations of academic journals across disciplines.

The journals themselves run the gamut from a relatively new publication on Francophone culture to a decades-old journal on consumer research. But they all further and establish knowledge in their fields.

“Academic journals are where research-informed consensus happens, especially in terms of what constitutes knowledge,” says Heather Young-Leslie, senior research partner with the CSSH’s Office of the Vice-President of Research and Innovation.

Young-Leslie adds that the researchers involved in the journals are essential to this process as well. Through editing and peer-review, they work to ensure that knowledge created by authors holds up to the strictest standards of academic rigour.

“They are a hidden lynchpin in the process whereby research becomes something that society knows,” says Young-Leslie.

Sarah Moore, a professor at the Alberta School of Business, is one such researcher at the CSSH. She joined the Journal of Consumer Research’s editorial team in February 2020. Currently an associate editor with the publication, she was drawn to it for its lengthy history, dating back to 1974, and the innovative lenses through which it studies consumer behaviour — ranging from anthropology to economics. “This is the top journal in the field,” Moore says. 

In this role, Moore is a vital part of the team, linking submitted articles with reviewers, integrating reviewers’ comments into a report for the Editor, and providing a pathway for authors to revise their papers. The ultimate aim is to help authors improve the quality of their research. The multi-round process of reviewing and revising plays an important role in academic publishing. It helps produce a stronger end product that is grounded in the literature and uses appropriate methods. It also helps ensure that a piece of research, which could be cited by other academics, quoted by policymakers and journalists or even simply discussed by everyday people, is replicable and relevant.

Sharp and strong

Another key role that editorial staff play in academic journals is peer review. CSSH researchers are part of the world-wide corpus of peers that make peer-reviewed academic journals. Through the process of peer review, academics check that a submission is original and that its methods are sound, appropriate to the problem and the findings are valid. In many ways, it protects the trust that a field of study has built, and it motivates authors to submit their best work.

The Alberta Journal of Educational Research (AJER) based at the Faculty of Education has been devoted to the dissemination, interpretation, critique, and support of all forms of scholarly inquiry into education since 1955, attracting around 200 submissions a year, representing close to 500 researchers from 40 countries.

“The establishment and maintenance of a pool of well-established specialists in particular areas of research or methodology, who are willing and able to review the submitted manuscripts is of critical importance to any journal’s scholarly reputation,” says AJER editor and education professor Anna Kirova.

“As the oldest active educational journal in Canada, AJER has stood its ground as a reputable, peer-reviewed educational research journal that continues to provide space for innovations in research and to advance diverse epistemological approaches.”

The Review of Constitutional Studies, published by the U of A Faculty of Law-based Centre for Constitutional Studies (CCS) since 1993, is one of only a few journals that publishes research on Canadian constitutional law — many similar journals in the United States only publish on U.S. topics.

Richard Mailey, director of the CCS and the publication’s managing editor, says that The Review’s two editors-in-chief handle the peer review process. If they decide a submission is of a high enough quality, they work to find reviewers with expertise in its subject matter, and ask them to perform a double blind peer review process, in which the reviewers are anonymous. It isn’t always easy to find peer reviewers, considering the time and effort involved, Mailey says.

All the same, the process is important, Mailey says. It ensures a standard of quality for a publication, and the field writ large. And it helps authors produce their best work — making them stronger writers and researchers. “I think the review process is invaluable as a way of helping author's sharpen their arguments and strengthen their submissions,” he says.

Anne Malena is professor emerita of the U of A’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and managing editor of TranscultUrAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies. The publication began at the U of A in 2008 with the goal of inviting “contributions in the rich and diverse fields of translation and cultural studies,” Malena says.

Malena will on occasion act as a peer reviewer for TranscultUrAl, if the need arises and the submission is within her expertise. The publication uses a set of evaluation criteria that ranks a submission on factors such as originality, logic, structure, clarity, methodology and relevance. On top of her other editorial roles, she also writes detailed comments for authors, based upon these criteria. She believes the peer review process to be an important one. “In my experience, reviewers take the job seriously and use constructive criticism to improve these criteria and expand the resources the authors use,” she says.

Open access

Academics at the CSSH play other important roles in the operation of these publications. For instance, some editorial team members of academic journals work to find opportunities for special editions, multidisciplinary collaboration and novel ways of sharing the research in the journals.

Lynette Shultz is a professor at the U of A’s Faculty of Education and editor of the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, a position she’s held since 2015 after initially joining the team in 2015. She says that she and her team are planning a special human rights issue of the journal which will include various faculty members from across the CSSH. Moore says the Journal of Consumer Research is trying to find new and innovative ways to disseminate research to consumers themselves.

Meanwhile, other CSSH researchers oversaw or aided in transitioning journals to an open-access, online format. When Dominik Wujastyk — professor at the U of A’s Department of History, Classics and Religion — founded the the journal History of Science in South Asia (HSSA), he wanted to ensure it was “integrated into and visible to the international community,” especially for the people who study the history of science, but may not think of regions outside of English-dominated academia..

One way to achieve this was making it open access, helping it expand its reach to international audiences and authors. The journal Scandinavian-Canadian Studies took a somewhat similar path. According to Natalie Van Deusen, professor at the U of A’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, the journal aims to provide a platform for a wide range of authors within the field. “I hope that the journal will continue on its current trajectory, and will attract submissions from not only Canadian scholars, but North American and international ones as well,” says Van Deusen, who took over the role of editor in 2020.

Wujastyk, Shultz and Van Deusen say that the U of A Library staff were extremely helpful in the process of migrating the HSSA’s content and infrastructure to the school’s digital platform. The staff provided technical assistance and troubleshooting as needed.

“I cannot speak highly enough about them,” Wujastyk says. “They did a tricky transfer from one platform to another with complete success, and have continued to support the journal in important ways since then, including by finding funding.”

For many academics, working to establish their academic journal as a free, open-access source of knowledge is important. Sathya Rao, professor of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies founded Alternative Francophone in 2012. Rao, also co-editor of the publication, began it with the goal of creating a free, open-access journal that studies French language and culture through diverse fields, such as literature, post-colonial studies and visual studies.

Where knowledge lives

Making Alternative Francophone open access was a way to get diverse voices and perspectives into the peer-reviewed publication. It also makes the research it publishes much more accessible to other academics and the public. The publication is also available through the Quebec-based, non-profit publishing platform Erudit (on which 95 per cent of research is freely available). In all, the publication is designed to give a voice to scholars from “the margins of international Francophone communities,” Rao says.

From the get-go, the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education was intended to be open access, its editors hoping for its content to be freely accessible, and for the pages to act as a platform for grad students, new researchers and researchers from regions and of backgrounds “you might not otherwise hear from,” including Indigenous, Shultz says.

Attracting researchers and submissions from diverse backgrounds — which many academic journals strive to do — is beneficial. Academic research is built on the concept of objectivity, and publishing research from around the globe, from people of colour, women and 2SLGBTQ+ individuals helps combat against bias. It can also work to broaden the perspectives and types of research that gets published, and the knowledge that gets created.

The knowledge created in academic journals plays an important role, and not just in academia. It can have notable impacts on a national and even international level in terms of policy, culture and humanity’s understanding of itself and its systems.

According to Mailey, the editorial staff of theThe Review of Constitutional Studies recently published an issue that the Supreme Court of Canada cited multiple times. Mailey wants the CCS-based journal to “stay on the cutting edge,” and publish work that deals with contemporary issues that are relevant to Canadians. He adds that he was pleased to see the publication involved in the way the courts interpret the Constitution.

“One key hope for any law journal is that it can consistently publish work that will be cited by the courts, and that will accordingly help define the trajectory of the law over time,” he says.

Malena says that her field, translation, is a relatively new and small one. This comes with many opportunities to expand the research area. For example, audio-visual translation is a topic that has developed quite quickly over the past 20 years along with new technologies, she says.

Academic journals play an important role, both inside and outside of academia. They are “an important place where research-informed consensus occurs, or at least where important conversations take place and are developed through ongoing research and dialogue between academics in the field,” Van Deusen says.