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The bibliography of this paper is provably the most unspeakable, out of fashion, no longer necessary or relevant set of references ever published in a sociology journal. They are not the least cited, but the most forgotten. These books and articles were at one point quite famous among publishing sociologists but have since suffered near-complete extinction. The explanations of these famous works' unlikely demise reflect the mechanisms and history of the maintenance and change of the discipline, such as obliteration by incorporation, topical and epistemological shifts in the field, founder-selection, the effects of reputation entrepreneurship, and the shifting of what is intellectually unspeakable. I give this index of the forgotten some face-validity by reviewing exegetical work on "forgotten" sociologists and by conducting qualitative analysis (autopsies) of the biggest falls in conversation with the history of sociology and the sociology of science. Finally, I provide an online tool for further investigation into events in sociology's citation history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various ethical issues that often involve dilemmas to face editors of scholarly journals. These issues are treated via discussions of treatment of colleagues' submissions; paradigm. based decisions, and decisions based on personal sociological predilections and commitments; "reasonable" referee-assignment policies; policies with respect to how referees' judgments are used; and "privileged" treatment of categories of authors relative to other categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2000 issue of The American Sociologist. As a new millennium unfolds, a global dialogue in sociology is underway that promises to enrich and renew culture-bound sociological imaginations. As Gary Marx notes, by 1911 Edward A. Ross, a towering figure in his day, had published a book for popular audiences about China as seen by a sociological traveler. Karl Marx brings this commentary up to date, and provides insight into a reality that Ross did not experience, namely, the teaching of sociology in Chinese universities. William Buxton has gathered together a fascinating set of materials about U.S. interest in Asia, with particular reference to Talcott Parsons, Harvard University and Japan. As he notes, these materials call into question simplistic views of Parsons as a Eurocentric thinker by documenting an ongoing encounter with Asia that extended from the 1940s through the late 1970s. One product of events at Harvard was a graduate-seminar paper written in 1941 by Marion Levy and rediscovered by him a half century later. In addition to its relevance for the emergent sociology of Asia, Levy's paper is a most interesting example of early functionalist analysis in U.S. sociology.

This article is taken from Chapter 6 of the publication A Lucky Journey: The Sociological Enterprise, 1931-1980, which reflects on the progress of the American Sociological Review (ASR) as a publication from 1958 to 1960. The local editorial staff of the publication began with a contingent of ten scholars. These ten scholars included representatives of various sub-fields in sociology and of related discipline as well as specialists on Soviet Russia, Africa, India and Japan. Most of the day-to-day labor on the Review was done by editorial secretary Betty Vogel, Michael Olmsted, and their nominal boss. Michael Olmsted was more than a first-rate book review editor, he evaluated papers in his special fields with sagacity and designed an attractive cover to replace what had long been the dismal front of the publication. Solicitation of papers by prominent sociologists helped to upgrade ASR as a scholarly journal. Another change was the introduction of a division of the Review on the Profession which included not merely the obituaries or communications pertaining to the sociological guild, but both solicited submitted articles on the occupation itself. This innovation, according to the author, was consistent with his own growing interest in the sociology of sociology.

Presents an introduction to the papers published in the journal "American Sociologist."

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2002 issue of The American Sociologist. This issue features six papers that explore several related themes in the intellectual history of sociology. The authors place particular emphasis on the enduring legacies of creative minds, while also tracing out unnoticed linkages between thinkers and intellectual traditions and pointing to unresolved tensions and lacunae within individual approaches. The articles combine a retrospective glance with a commitment to incorporating and further developing the insights of earlier work. There is also a happy blending of the personal, the conceptual, and the historical. Uta Gerhardt contributes an erudite and nuanced discussion of the relations between major figures who are ordinarily regarded as polar opposites: social-action and social-system theorist Talcott Parsons and members of the frankfurt School of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Jean-Francois Côté and Daniel Dagenais provide further insight into the development of critical sociology similar to that of the Frankfurt School within the context of contemporary Canada, especially Quebec.

This study builds on and extends two studies by Oromaner ( J Am Soc Inf Sci, 28:34–37, ; Int J Inf Manage, 6:29–35, ) in which he examined the integrating role of sociology’s three core general journals ( American Journal of Sociology (AJS), American Sociological Review (ASR), Social Forces (SF)) among both core ( N = 3) and specialty ( N = 7) journals. In each study he traced the number of citations received by full-length articles published in the core journals (1960, 1973) during the first 10 years after publication. The present study replicates this methodology for articles published in 1990. In addition, the present study looks at the relationship between each of the core journals and each of the ten citing journals. The percent of core articles cited has increased from 67 to 84, however, the percent cited in five or more journals has remained quite stable and low (13%, 10%, 12%). Core journal articles are more likely to be cited in core journals than they are in specialty journals, and there appears to be some relationship between specific core journals and certain specialty journals. More in depth analysis is presented for the 1990 cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do sociologists collaborate? Has this changed over time? What factors contribute to research collaboration among sociologists? To answer these questions, we examine trends in collaboration over a 70 year period and empirically test a variety of explanations for the increase in collaboration that we find. We analyze data collected from a stratified random sample of articles in two leading sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 ( n = 1274). Most of our analyses are descriptive and display trends over time. However, we pool the data across all years and estimate logistic regression models to assess the relative contribution of various factors. We find that the importance of geographical location has been waning since the 1950s, although the growth in cross-place collaborations stagnated between 1980 and 2005. We find that quantitative research is more likely to be collaborative, as are projects requiring data collection, though this may change because the collaboration rate among secondary data users is increasing at a faster rate. We find no significant gender differences in rates of collaboration, although male sole-authorship remains the most common form of publication. We also find the institutional prestige of coauthors is typically higher than that of sole-authors. Our results elucidate the extent of collaboration in sociology and reveal how several factors have contributed to this major shift in work organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the American Sociological Association (ASA) as a portrait of organizational success and intellectual paralysis. There are many important things that the ASA does very well. Its conventions are now quite large and complicated, with more than 200 sessions and close to a thousand persons participating in the sessions. Planning for a convention starts four years in advance with the choice of a site, and program committees work hard for a year in setting up sessions and recruiting session organizers. The sessions have changed over the past few decades, as of 1981. In the early days, sessions were organized more casually, networks of acquaintances being used frequently as means to solicit papers for sessions. Now, participation has been placed on a more universalistic basis. More opportunities are provided for members to exchange ideas and information about work in progress through luncheon roundtables, workshops, and poster sessions. The ASA also is successful in publishing its journals and in running a monograph series. The journals do come out more or less on time and are delivered to the right addresses. If there is an establishment in the ASA, it is composed of persons who are well known, mainly through their scholarly works or other activities that bring them to the attention of the members. Although the ASA must be reckoned successful in a bureaucratic sense, it has not been successful in advancing the intellectual side of the discipline.

The time has come for critical scrutiny of the process by which sociological journals evaluate papers and reject or accept them. Some proposals for change (to which the author is not dogmatically committed) are presented to stimulate discussion and provide impetus toward reform. The purpose of the proposed changes is to lessen both poor refereeing and its effects on editorial decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the results of a survey administered to a sample of American sociologists which attempted to determine the degree of attention paid to TAS, as compared with the other "core" journals, and to learn about the attitudes of our respondents concerning articles appearing in TAS that deal with the day-to-day affairs of sociology in five key areas. Thus, within the context of a general debate over the merits of navel-gazing for sociology (for example, Gouldner, 1973; Lipset and Ladd, 1973), we assess empirically how American sociologists feel about some aspects of this issue. In this study we have attempted to discover how American sociologists feel on the question of navel-gazing in sociology. The majority stated quite clearly their support for a continuing discussion of issues which relate to the day-to-day workings of sociologists and sociology. Several specific points deserve more than passing mention. First, American sociologists seem to agree that articles on the teaching of sociology and the publication process deserve attention in the pages of TAS. Articles on the distribution of specialties in sociology, prestige ratings of departments, and career mobility of sociologists seem to have less appeal, but we speculate that this is possibly more a reflection of dissatisfaction with the number of these articles than with the type. Second, although this was not emphasized in our questionnaire, some suggestions were made concerning other areas of interest which it was felt deserved attention in TAS. It would seem that a study attempting to define the broad range of issues which interest American sociologists, particularly those that it is felt have not been adequately dealt with in TAS (or in other professional journals), would be useful at this time. Finally, it can be recalled that the impetus for our study derived from a letter from a British sociologist criticizing what he considered to be a preponderance of "bizarre navel-gazing" in TAS.... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the topics that will discussed in the "American Sociologist" journal, including constructions of the sociological tradition, life in academic departments, sociology and spirituality, social, business and economics and sociology and public policy.

Presents an introduction to articles published in the December 1992 issue of the journal "The American Sociologist."

The trend toward specialization in sociology continues as in other disciplines. This has led to a corresponding move of scholars from research problems on the field level to those contextualized in subfields. Data collected from 279 manuscripts were studied to examine the Zuckerman-Merton hypothesis suggesting that higher rejection rates may indicate higher agreement among referees. In this study, three measures of agreement are compared to demonstrate the association of agreement and rejection rates within specialties. In addition to agreement measures, mean ratings of contribution to the literature and writing style represented different aspects of the referees' judgments. Referee agreement on recommendation to the editor is a good predictor of a manuscript's final outcome. Thus, it correlates very highly to the rejection rate based on the editorial decision outcome. This confirms the findings of Hargens (1988) that rejection rates remain good indicators of referee agreement. According to our findings, they are even better indicators on the subfield level. The findings demonstrate peer review responds differently to subfields than fields. This level of analysis improved our ability to predict editorial decision outcomes for peer-reviewed manuscripts over a previous model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces the papers published in the December 1, 2003 issue of the journal "The American Sociologist."

The article discusses the journal space available to sociologists. The journal space available to sociologists has increased very substantially in the past decade or so, primarily through the founding of specialized sociological journals and interdisciplinary ones related to sociological specialties. There may be a scarcity of publication outlets for sociologists in some specialties and for those who write on some topics, but for most sociologists, there are ample outlets for most if not all of the reasonably good papers they can produce, including some rather offbeat, nonmainstream ones and those reporting replications. Of course, there is a scarcity of space in the most prestigious and conspicuous journals, as there will be as long as there is a distinct prestige hierarchy among sociological journals. The very high rejection rates of some sociology journals result not from an absolute scarcity of space available to the discipline but from the distinct prestige hierarchy of the journals and a widespread preference among sociologists to publish in general rather than specialized journals. Nevertheless, it is true that Ph. D.s in several other disciplines typically have longer publication lists than sociologists, for several reasons, one of which is a greater availability of journal space.

This articles presents the topics discussed in the June 1998 issue concerning sociology. All of the articles here are historical, but not merely so. All look beyond the bare chronicling of events to the larger and wider impact of those events on the sociological enterprise. Gary Jaworski examines receptions to Simmel's work at two universities in order to illumine the open-ended, constructed and contested nature of the sociological tradition. William Buxton presents one little known, and done previously unpublished, work by Parsons on Georg Simmel in an effort to expand dialogue on the significance of Simmel in Parson's thought. Bernard Barber takes up a similar theme by focusing on how Parsons' thinking about social systems gradually evolved. The editor's contribution, finally, points to the influence of developments in psychology on the famous experiment in Social Relations at Harvard. The emphasis in all articles is the unfolding of ideas and the consequence of interpretative decisions, including roads not taken. In view of Talcott Parson's worldwide reputation and influence, his lost manuscript on Simmel may attract considerable scholarly attention. Indeed, Professors Don Levine, Kiyomitsu Yui, Charles Camic and Hans Joas and others have been planning a series of papers on this manuscript that may appear at a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society or elsewhere.

The article presents the author's response to criticisms against his article on changes in some role relationships in the editorial review process of general sociology journals. Some of these concerns are well founded. We can all agree it would be unwise for ASA journals or for independent journals to adopt sweeping changes without hard evidence on the probable effect of such changes. Such evidence should not be difficult to obtain. If research is undertaken, however, I would hope that it would try to assess some of the social psychological dynamics of the editorial review process. Research on the publishing of scientific papers, such as Duncan Lindsey's excellent volume, has not focused much on how authors, referees and editors differ in their attitudes and in their definitions and perceptions of the situation, on how the editorial review process is affected by these differences and on how the structure of the process itself is a cause of them. These comments have suggested a number of questions about the editorial review process that need to be fortrightly addressed and empirically answered. But I want one of my own questions answered--one to which these comments were not responsive and one for which survey data would be useless.

We investigate the historical trajectories of several sociological journals published by regional associations, focusing our attention on one of the first regional journals published by the Pacific Sociological Association, Sociological Perspectives. We begin with a discussion of the journal's origins and look at its professional and geographical development over time. Through a comparative-historical analysis of author affiliations of articles published in regional journals, we find geographic ties are important in shaping the early content of regional journals. However, as time passes, regional ties are stretched to include work from a broadening spectrum of regions and nations. So, while regional sociological journals do appear to maintain their original geographical connections, they also tend to expand their relative geographical influence over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the results of an analysis of all racial and ethnic relations articles published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Social Problems, from January 1969 through December 1995. The analysis identifies by journal: 1) major methodological orientation(s); 2) how the. concepts of "race," "ethnicity," and racial and ethnic relations are operationalized, which is useful for examining tendencies toward, or against, reification; 3) substantive content-that is, what a sociology of racial and ethnic relations is; and 4) primary context-that is, are racial and ethnic relations treated as a substantive subdiscipline in their own right, or are they merely a topic of interest for other subdisciplines such as social psychology? In brief, although some differences exist between the journals, all four journals publish disproportionately racial and ethnic relations research that: 1) is highly quantitative as opposed to theoretical, conceptual, or sociohistorical; 2) reifics U.S. Census definitions of race and ethnicity as opposed to critically evaluating such definitions; 3) social psychologizes racial and ethnic relations, or subsumes such relations under stratification processes; and 4) subsumes the racial and ethnic relations problematic under subdiscipline rubrics other than a sociology of racial and ethnic relations. The conclusion discusses the implications of these findings; for example, by virtue of what they publish, these journals construct a paradigmatic frame that gives precedence to, or legitimizes, some views and excludes, or delegitimizes others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many sociologists have suggested that the dominant paradigm in sociology ignores the environment, which accounts for the fact that environmental sociology is poorly represented in sociology's mainstream journals. The purpose of this article is to test this assumption empirically by examining the coverage of environmental sociology in nine mainstream sociology journals from 1969 through 1994. The nine journals are separated into two tiers, representing higher and lower prestige journals. Each environmental article is categorized by its area (attitudes and behaviors, environmental movement, political economy, risk, and "new human ecology') and whether it involves "sociology of the environmental issues" (the application of standard sociological perspectives to environmental issues) or "core environmental sociology" (the examination of societal-environmental relationships). We find that less than two percent of all articles published in the sampled journals in the twenty-five-year period of study were environmental, and that the higher tier journals were less likely to publish environmental articles than were the lower tier journals. Environmental articles were more likely to be part of "core environmental sociology" after 1981 than they were "sociology of the environmental issues," which suggests a greater recognition among both environmental sociologists and journal reviewers that human societies are ecosystem-dependent. The number of environmental articles increased in the 1990s, portending a fruitful period for sociologists specializing on the environment. We argue that the broader field of sociology can benefit by recognizing the linkages environmental sociology has to other sociological specializations and that, ultimately, sociology needs to be able to address environmental variables in order to understand society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on journal editors who are important gatekeepers of knowledge, but little has been written in sociology about how the research and theoretical interests and the professional reputations of editors influence the content of what appears in journals. This article examines the effect of editorial appointments on the personal citations of editors in articles and research notes published in general interest sociology journals. Citations in prominent sociology journals customarily have been used not only to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure, but also to rank the prestige of different departments. As a result, sociologists have written fairly extensively about the importance of journal citations in one's professional career development. There is reason to believe that even eminent editors of leading sociology journals, who hold tenured, senior professorships at prestigious universities, have an interest in their personal journal citations: possibly they desire better paying positions at even more elite universities.

Scholarly manuscripts typically an revised many times prior to publication. Revision has be- come such an expected part of the manuscript review process that different review procedures have been implemented to deal with the revised manuscripl. This article compares analyses of the peer review and editorial decision-making process for first-submission manuscripts am/for revised and resubmitted manuscripts to the American Sociological Review (ASR) between 1977 and 1981. For each group of manuscripts we estimate a two-stage path model. These models predicts percent of the variance for first submission manuscripts and 80 percent for resubmitted manuscripts. Because the review processes for "R & R manuscripts are different we propose three publication strategies for authors considering resubmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]