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 Studies of Science

For those interested in publishing articles that investigate core concerns in the field of science and technology studies.

Social Studies of Science invites submissions from “sociologists, historians, social and cultural anthropologists, other social scientists, philosophers, and researchers in legal and educational disciplines” and publishes original research, review essays and discussion papers, brief research notes, and occasional editorials about core concerns of science and technology studies. Over the past several years, review essays seem less common and short research notes seem more common.

Articles over the past five years have considered a representative slice of objects of study for the field: some directly observe scientific research (e.g. a particular research team or experiment).  Others track the emergence of a data management strategy, a system or category of classification, a technology, a diagnosis, or an analytic approach or epistemic practice in a scientific or social scientific field.  Still others examine the constitution of a population under study, the adoption of a metric or instrument, or the public status of a scientific research or technological development agenda.

One interesting thing about SSS is that very small objects of study are not uncommon, such as the putative causal connections identified by one period of a field of study or the treatment of risk in a small set of medical or scientific texts.  Case studies are common, as are central STS methodologies such as actor-network analysis and laboratory ethnography, though archival research and other qualitative strategies such as focus groups and discourse analysis also appear.

Citations tend towards scholars on the list of editors, articles published in this journal, and works by authors who frequently publish in the journal.

SSS uses a double blinded peer review system. The journal encourages data sharing and asks for data citation in article submissions.

One or two special issues are published each year; past special issues have included: Toxic Politics; Breaking Scientific Networks; The Politics of Care in Technoscience; Genomic Research, Publics and Experts in Latin America—Nation, Race, and Body.

Editorials are yet more infrequent—the last one was entitled “Post-truth?”, published in early 2017, and was published before a series of discussion essays on the subject from various field-foundational scholars.

Useful for Submission

Word Count: 12,000 words for research articles

Issues per year: 6

Current volume number in 2019: 49

Articles per year: 30

Citation style:  SAGE Harvard

Abstract length (if required): no requirement; maximum tends to be ~275 words

Relevant Editors: Sergio Sismondo, Editor; collaborating editors and editorial advisors include many prominent scholars in the field

Open access?: some articles Creative Commons licensed

Online?: yes

Website:  https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sss

About Wendy Belcher

Associate Professor, Princeton University, Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies. Author of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. Instructor of Deep Reading Journals as Publishing Praxis.