The winners of our ECR paper competition for 2020-21

We are pleased to announce the results of our 2020-21 IJSRM competition for papers written by early career researchers (ECRs) who, at the time of submission, were either doctoral students or in their first three years of post-doctoral employment. Our aim has been to encourage and recognise research and contributions from new scholars in current and emerging methodological debates and practice.

All entries were subject to the Journal’s usual refereeing processes and had to reach our normal publishing standard. The winners were selected by a sub-panel of members of the IJSRM Editorial Board and the Journal Editors. The panel were impressed with the very strong field of entries, and we are pleased to announce not only a winner of the ‘Best ECR Article’ but also three ‘highly commended’ runners up.

Our IJSRM Early Career Researcher Prize is awarded to Stefanie Döringer (Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Vienna) for her article on ‘The problem-centred expert interview: Combining qualitative interviewing approaches for investigating implicit expert knowledge’. The panel of judges remarked on a ‘clearly written and illuminating account’, representing ‘a lightbulb moment that brings two previously disconnected traditions together’, and that will be ‘highly valuable as a reference for many researchers for years to come’. Stephanie’s article has already been viewed over 16,500 times.

Stephanie said, ‘It is a great honor for me that my paper is awarded with the IJSRM Early Career Researchers’ prize. The appreciative comments from the competition judges encourage me to follow my research interest further and to deepen my work with qualitative methods in social research’.

Our highly commended runners (in alphabetical order) are: Riccardo Ladini (University of Milan): ‘Assessing general attentiveness to online panel surveys: The use of instructional manipulation checks’ Órla Meadhbh Murray (Imperial College London): ‘Text, Process, Discourse: Doing Feminist Text Analysis in Institutional Ethnography’ Kate Summers (London School of Economic and Political Science): ‘For the greater good? Ethical reflections on interviewing the ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ in qualitative research’

Many congratulations to Stephanie, and also to Kate, Órla and Riccardo.

Changes to our Journal metrics – a more rounded picture?

Journal Impact Factors – based on citations of articles published in the journal concerned, have been used as a proxy for the prestige of a journal in comparison with others in its field. And promotion committee considerations can be based on whether an academic has had articles published in high impact factor outlets. But this means of assessing the value of journals, the quality of articles published in them, and by extension the standing of the authors of published pieces, has been subject to criticism. These concerns run from questioning the reliability of the measurement and ranking, through encouragement to editors and authors to game the system, to condemnation of a neo-liberalised audit culture in academia. Some publishers and platforms, such as PLOS, have decided not to display Impact Factors.

Our Journal’s publisher, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, is now starting to shift away from the Impact Factor as a key indicator of quality, replacing it with a ‘basket’ of metrics in an effort to provide a more rounded views of the various ways in which a journal and articles published within it may have scholarly, policy and social ‘impact’.

The metrics being posted on the publishers’ IJSRM page for 2020 are:

• an Impact Factor of 3.061 for the year, and one of 4.508 over a 5-year period
• a new Journal Citation Indicator of 2.15, ranking 13/254 in the category of Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary, and
• a CiteScore of 5.0, ranking 16/260 in all Social

Whether or not such moves deal with the concerns about measurement reliability, gaming the system, and evaluating of academics, is a moot point.

Call for Early Career Reviewer (ECR) College Members

The IJSRM is a leading methods journal in the field, publishing articles across the methodological spectrum.  The Journal has established a Reviewer College as part of its commitment to supporting early career social researchers and methodologists, progression to full board members, and values the new ideas and approaches they bring.

We welcome applications from early career researchers with demonstrable expertise in:

• quantitative research design and analysis
• online research design
• Indigenous methodologies
• social media research
• ethnography
• computational social science

As a member of the IJSRM Reviewer College you will be invited to review up to four submitted papers a year, and will receive a discount voucher for Taylor & Francis products for each review you undertake. To apply for the College, please submit your CV and covering letter outlining your methods expertise to the IJSRM Administrator tsrm-editor@tandf.co.uk.

Call for Contributions: Adapting Conventional Research Methods for the New Normal

In search of Novel Adaptations in Social Science Research Methods for the World of COVID

With a second wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping across the West, it is becoming clear that returning to ‘normal‘ maybe a long way off yet. Though, the need for social research is now more pressing than ever. The International Journal of Social Research Methodology is inviting researchers, academics, and doctoral students to share blog contributions reflecting their experiences in adapting existing research methods to meet the needs of our new research paradigm. The goal is to help the social science research community find inspiration and learn from one other as we continue to adapt our methods to meet contemporary needs. Contributions reflecting all aspects of social science research, including research ethics as well as quantitative and qualitative methods, are welcome. Preference will be given to submissions that demonstrate novel adaptation, creativity, and/or innovation.

Your contributions should be emailed to tsrm-editor@tandf.co.uk in MS Word format. Accompanying images may be included. Contributions should not exceed 1,000 words.

Updated Deadline for submissions is 21 December 2020.

The 10th International Conference on Social Science Methodology

The 10th International Conference on Social Science Methodology of RC33 (“Logic and Methodology in Sociology”, of the International Sociological Association) will be held in September 2020.

One of our IJSRM Editorial Board members is conference Chair.  He writes:

We organize our 10th International Conference on Social Science Methodology which will be held in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, on 8-11 September 2020. The local host of the Conference will be the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus.  The conference venue is the luxurious Landmark Hotel.

The thematic focus of our Conference is: Empirical Research and Society. We live in an era of “alternative news” and “climate change denial”. We experience a political life where populism prevails over scientific evidence. In such turbulent times, it is important for methodologists to investigate how to encourage society to re-focus on robust scientific evidence. We aspire for our Conference to fully cover the diverse interests of our members (qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods).

We will be running an IJSRM panel session on ‘Who owns data? Big data and democratisation’ at the conference, chaired by our co-editor Malcolm Williams. Brian Castellani (also co-editor), Evelyn Ruppert, Susan Oman and Maggie Walter will be addressing knotty questions around who owns the questions, the research and the data, and who should own the questions, the research and the data, in discussion with the audience.  If you’re attending the RC33 conference (and what self-respecting methodologist wouldn’t want to), please come along and participate.

We will also be contributing to an ‘ask the editors’ session that is part of the conference.

You can find further details of the conference at: http://cyprusconferences.org/rc33/