Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences
We give you the scuttlebutt on academic journals—aiding you in selecting the right journal for publication—in reviews that are sometimes snarky, sometimes lengthy, always helpful. Written by Princeton University graduate students and Wendy Laura Belcher.
Social Forces
For those interested in publishing articles that examine empirically-driven sociological research questions.
Social Forces publishes research by established scholars in the field as well as newer authors—graduate students are relatively frequent contributors. The research that appears in the journal is by and large highly empirically driven: research questions are posed with reference to observations from the data analyzed and from existing research. Methods and theory tend to be used in service of empirics rather than data used as material with which to examine abstractly framed disciplinary debates or methodological problems, and a novel empirical finding is sufficient for publication. Solo authorship and coauthorship are both common, with solo authorship seeming somewhat more common over the past five years. Social Forces appears to be a space that hosts more descriptive findings from research whose more causal, explanatory or methodologically innovative elements have been published in AJS or ASR. Secondary findings from such studies are also sometimes published in Social Forces. Articles are grouped by theme in each issue, with anywhere between one and five articles comprising a section about major disciplinary areas of focus. In the past five years, these have included inequality and stratification, comparative historical sociology, globalization, race & ethnicity, violence, gender & technical innovation, work and immigration, theory, crime and deviance, collective action, economic sociology, and networks. Articles themselves vary in structure, with thematic subsections reflecting the particulars of individual papers.
Useful for Submission
Word Count: ~9,500-10,000
Issues per year: 4
Current volume number: 97
Articles per year: 64
Citation style: Author-date; footnotes not allowed
Abstract length (if required): 250 words
Upcoming special issues (if available):
Relevant Editors: Arne Kalleberg, editor; large international editorial board, US editorial board, and UNC editorial board
Open access?: some articles released
Online?: yes
About Wendy Belcher
