Abstract
As we officially begin our tenure as the incoming editors of Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), we want to provide some background and the key principles that will guide our editorship. JLR has historically been one of the very top journals in literacy research, and we intend to continue this tradition. To accomplish this, we have developed an ambitious set of goals that include reviewing and publishing research drawing on the highest standards in education, securing an interdisciplinary space for literacy research, balancing the need for conceptual, basic, applied, and policy-related work, promoting new and diverse voices, and constructively utilizing social media and other means to raise the impact of JLR. However, before we detail these goals, we begin with some history and background to our team.
The Editorial Team: Some History and Introductions
At this writing of our inaugural editorial in early 2014 for JLR Volume 46, Patricia Anders, David Yaden, and Ana Christina da Silva Iddings from the University of Arizona and Laurie Katz from The Ohio State University have been working diligently as a team for an entire year, assuming all editorial duties and JLR business from the outstanding editorial team of Douglas Hartman, Susan Florio-Ruane, and Douglas Kaufman at the beginning of 2013. These duties included the final editing and preparation of 18 previously accepted manuscripts most of which have been published in Volume 45 with two more to appear in this current issue. Assisted during the past year by a stellar and thoroughly competent group of Editorial Assistants comprised of Charlene Mendoza, Tori Flint, and Robert de Roock (University of Arizona) and Robert Heggestad (The Ohio State University), our team learned the journal publishing ropes together—with the expected (and some unexpected) slips, falls, and bruises. Some of these “learning opportunities” included dealing with a time shift forward of 12½ hours as production was transferred from SAGE’s California office in Thousand Oaks to the one in New Delhi, India. Thus, our work hours approximately coincide with when our production team is sleeping! This shift put a minor—but manageable—strain on correspondence both with us and JLR authors.
In addition, we have been surprised to learn what the online submission system (ScholarOne) can and cannot do as well as its inevitable glitches—some fixable, some not. And most importantly, of course, we have been confronted directly with the considerable and very humbling responsibility of providing the dutiful and professional stewardship of one of the premier research journals in literacy studies. In this latter task, we depend heavily on the deep knowledge, critical perspectives, and scholarly acumen of our editorial review board, without whom the process of knowledgeable, sensitive, and perspicacious peer review could not happen. We trust that the remainder of this editorial lays out transparently for our colleagues in the field the guiding principles, standards, and processes that we will follow to execute our stewardship according to the highest ethical principles of not only the Literacy Research Association (LRA) but also those of the many disciplines and organizations that our JLR authors represent. But first, an additional introduction to new members of our team is in order as well as a brief purview of our collective academic histories and areas of expertise.
First, we are very happy to announce that in 2014, Theresa Rogers of the University of British Columbia will join us as an Associate Editor, International, along with Editorial Assistant, Harini Rajagopal, to assist her in this task. While JLR has received submissions from authors representing more than 30 countries outside North America in the past three years, few have been published. The reasons for this are varied, but we have found that different styles of writing and approaches to reporting research, despite addressing relevant literacy issues, often results in manuscripts being reviewed poorly. We hope as shortly addressed below that given Theresa’s considerable expertise in international literacy and policy issues that further work with authors outside the United States will increase their presence in JLR. Also joining our team in 2014 as an editorial assistant is Kelly Allen, currently a doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
Second, all members of the editorial team have been long-time participants in the Literacy Research Association (formerly the National Reading Conference), having served the organization in various leadership positions (e.g., Anders as a recent Past LRA President; Rogers as a Board of Directors member), committee capacities (Yaden, Ethics Committee; Rogers, Publications Committee; Iddings, Katz, & Rogers as Area and/or Study Group Chairs), as well as members of the editorial board of JLR, the NRC Yearbook, or as conference proposal reviewers. Furthermore, all have regularly presented their research at the annual conference over a period of many years—in some cases, over 30! In addition to being active and widely published scholars in the literacy field, most members of the team have published in JLR either under its present title or formerly as the Journal of Reading Behavior as well as in the LRA/NRC Yearbook. Furthermore, all members have experience serving on the editorial boards of major research journals (e.g., Reading Research Quarterly, Research in theTeaching of English, American Educational Research Journal) and are highly familiar with standards for both reporting and reviewing research. Finally, two of our members, in particular, bring recent editorial experience to the team with Laurie Katz just completing a 5-year term as Co-Editor of Language Arts and Ana Christina da Silva Iddings currently serving as an Associate Editor of Urban Education.
Finally, the team represents a broad range of content and research expertise in literacy within both interpretive and quantitative methodologies with pre-K through youth and adult populations, including expertise in such research areas as processes of literacy acquisition, theoretical frameworks, epistemologies of research, instructional approaches and interventions, literacy teacher education and professional development, new literacies, bilingualism and bi-literacy, developmental, social and cultural influences on learning, special needs populations as well as policy development and its practical consequences. We now turn to the guiding principles that will characterize our editorship.
Editorial Policy Statement
Standards of Research Integrity
As one of the premier research journals in the field of literacy in the United States and abroad, it is paramount that the articles appearing in JLR maintain the highest standards of research and compelling quality across the many interdisciplinary fields from which authors derive their theoretical frameworks, inquiries of research and methodologies. To both maintain this quality and encourage the broadest intellectual range of topics relevant to the study of literacy learning and development across the life span, we strongly suggest that both reviewers of JLR manuscripts and potential authors refer to the Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research (2006) and Standards for Reporting on Humanities-Oriented Research (2009) recently developed by the American Educational Research Association. These guidelines, developed for the broad educational community with both the producer and consumer of research in mind, are neither meant to be prescriptive nor an exhaustive list of the criteria for research reporting but rather as relevant epistemological and practical parameters within which the conduct, interpretation, and ethical implications of research may be properly judged and evaluated. Given that JLR serves as a prominent public, intellectual, and professional voice to which many stakeholders look for support in promoting the well-being of children and youth, inasmuch as possible, we will consult these scholarly and public standards as a reasonable and viable bases for our publication decisions.
Interdisciplinary Research Scope and Intellectual Range
JLR has long been known as a journal in which a broad range of topics and methodologies have been published. As an editorial team, we will continue this effort to encourage the broadest possible participation of the many disciplines in which the acquisition and learning of written language becomes a topic of concern in the development of those fields. We intend to encourage the submission of articles that describe research dealing with both in-school and out-of-school written language development as well research exploring the increasing range of literacy formats—both electronic and otherwise—to which children and youth are exposed. In addition, the editorial team also seeks research that probes the further differentiation and illumination of literacy growth in special and vulnerable populations as those populations are situated in their particular social and cultural milieus. Finally, while JLR intends to publish the most compelling and cutting-edge research across any topic, it is understood that some topics have garnered more attention over the years than others such that some reported findings are not surprising but consistently replicated. In these cases, where a submission joins multiple studies over time that have converged on similar results, the editorial team encourages potential submitters to consider if newer perspectives might be proffered to illuminate traditional findings in ways that open up new research areas, pursue novel questions, or promote the development of more sophisticated and promising methodologies.
Balance of Theory Explication, Basic and Applied Research and Policy Implementation
While the range of the journal articles is in a large part determined by the extant submissions, the editorial team will be seeking to publish in each issue a judicious blend of articles that advance theory development in reading, writing, and spelling, shed light on processes of acquisition and development (i.e., cognitive, affective, socio-cultural, etc.), describe innovative and efficacious educational interventions (in and out of school), and explicate the various dimensions of literacy policy development that, in turn, have direct and indirect implications for practices in pre-K to higher educational institutions. The editorial board will be directed to look in particular for potential manuscripts that have a strong, coherent theory base that underlies the research or topic presented and how that theory or conceptual framework is revisited throughout the manuscript to undergird the study or argument in focus with an intellectually satisfying, logically plausible and integrated flow of thought and explication.
Promotion and Mentoring of New and Diverse Voices in the Field
In keeping with the goal of broadening the topic range of JLR by soliciting and encouraging broad scope of humanities-oriented and social science research with literacy as its focus, the editorial team will be seeking to find and develop new and diverse voices that may be doing research and writing in fields not frequently represented to research audiences in North America. One important way to broaden the range of submissions and published pieces, as well as to extend the reach and global presence of the journal, is to actively seek high-quality research from international and transnational scholars, creating a more inclusive international dialogue among literacy researchers and broadening the flow of ideas across national/international boundaries. In addition to offering non-English abstracts in the online versions of JLR on the SAGE website, they will also be available on the LRA home page. In this way, we hope to increase their access by international scholars through multiple web browsers.
The editorial team, however, realizes that success in this endeavor can only be accomplished with the assistance and recruiting efforts of the entire editorial review board who will be encouraged to solicit high-quality manuscripts for submission to the journal. In addition, we will work to develop presentations or opportunities at conferences or other venues that will provide a forum for potential authors to talk about their research interests and how they might be framed for publication in JLR. The editorial team will also work to include in the cadre of reviewers emerging scholars and to provide mentoring opportunities in the reviewing or writing process with more established and published scholars.
Raising the Status and Impact Factor of the Journal
Given that a journal’s impact factor has become an important metric for authors selecting a journal outlet to disseminate their research, for promotion and tenure committees in assessing the quality and influence of candidates’ work, and for libraries in making financial and inventory decisions for determining their journal archives, the editorial team will continue to promote the visibility of JLR in ways that will positively affect this rating such as encouraging JLR authors to cite relevant research published in the journal on their topic of interest, soliciting articles from widely published scholars on topics of national and international interest, promoting new voices discussing compelling topics and disseminating information about the journal at important professional meetings. Furthermore, building on the excellent work of the Hartman et al. team to transition JLR to an online submission system in 2011, our editorial group will continue to work with the LRA Board, LRA Headquarters, and SAGE to exploit the existing technologies and social media venues to promote JLR and exploit new and emerging ways to extend its visibility, accessibility, and influence.
Inclusion of New (and Old) Journal Features
As has JLR in the past, we would like to include a variety of reporting formats that may include editorials, commentaries and/or ripostes on published articles, short research summaries, and essay book reviews. We also plan to consider themed issues as a possibility. Furthermore, we plan to reinstitute the listing of the Editorial Board on the end pages of the journal as this visible acknowledgment of a person’s association with JLR as a reviewer is an important aspect of one’s professional reputation and visibility to the field as well as an inducement for potential authors seeking a dissemination outlet for their work as they recognize prominent researchers in the field and other colleagues whose work may be related to theirs. Finally, as one attempt to increase the space for substantive scholarly discussion, we have begun to suggest to authors to put some of their lengthy tables, charts, and appendices in an online, supplementary archive maintained by SAGE with the URL link embedded in the published article. This practice has already been instituted in Volume 45 (4).
Acknowledgments and Conclusion
We would be remiss if we ended this inaugural editorial without acknowledging those persons who deserve our sincere thanks for the tremendous support, wise counsel, and advocacy that we received this past year as we embarked upon this editorial journey. First of all, we are deeply appreciative to the former team of Douglas Hartman, Susan Florio-Ruane, and Douglas Kaufman as well as their editorial assistants, Chad Waldron, Mary Randel, and Paul Morsink who gave freely of their time assisting us as we took over duties that they had so competently done in their 6-year editorial tenure. We also were heartened by the unwavering support in 2013 of Past President, Richard Beach, and Tom Bean, outgoing Publications Committee chair. We are sincerely grateful as well for the continued expression of support from LRA President, Arlette Willis, as well as incoming Publications Committee chair, Thomas Devere Wolsey, and the LRA Board of Directors who have generously provided financial support for the journal. Also, Allison Leung, SAGE’s Education Journal Editor, has been always there, negotiating those behind-the-scenes details of publishing of which we know very little. And we should recognize those many colleagues, both former and current editors of major research journals, who did their best to prepare us for the task at hand. They will share in our successes—but not in our missteps. Finally, but foremost in our appreciation, is the cadre of JLR reviewers in 2013—more than 200 of them—whose unselfish and stalwart intellectual service provides the very foundation of the excellent reputation that the journal maintains.
Thus, it is with great pride, honor, and humility that we don the editorial mantle of the JLR. As the 12th team of editors since the journal’s inception in 1969, we follow a long line of distinguished colleagues and scholars who have given JLR their considerable time, intellectual energy, and commitment to excellence that has established the journal as one of the top-tier research journals in literacy studies for the past 45 years. We are dedicated to maintaining and even raising, if we can, its status in the field. But we are humbled greatly by our privilege in this position by a number of things: First, our fortunate position as the ones to benefit initially from reading the submissions by our colleagues—the first fruits of their research labor; second, the patience and circumspection evidenced by JLR authors as they grapple with both our editorial and reviewers’ comments to improve the reporting of their research; and finally, the gravity of the final decision-making process that we make in the context of advice from our review board on whether to publish or not. Either decision carries consequences for both the journal and authors—some known, some not. Our pledge to our colleagues as well as to LRA and its governing bodies is that we will discharge our editorial responsibilities, not only with an eye toward research excellence but also with editorial fairness, grace, and integrity.