New Book Review Essays Editor appointed to AJCS
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Celso Villegas (Kenyon College) has been appointed the Book Review Essays Editor for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Villegas has published on the performance qualities of COVID press conferences, civil sphere theory and middle-class formation, as well as middle-class protests and populism in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. He succeeds Dr. Isaac Ariail Reed (University of Virginia), who served as AJCS Book Reviews Editor from 2015–2020. Authors interested in submitting a book review essay to the journal should contact Dr. Villegas at villegasc@kenyon.edu, keeping in mind that AJCS only considers review essays that put two or more texts in conversation with one another. In addition to book reviews that focus on the meaning-centered, cultural aspects of contemporary sociology, Dr. Villegas is interested in reviews that open up conversations between the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology and W. E. B. Du Bois, critical race theory, queer theory, empire and decoloniality, and critical sociology more broadly.
Editorial statement on American Journal of Cultural Sociology metrics and rankings
The American Journal of Cultural Sociology is more aware than most that there is a vast range of metrics available to evaluate published scholarship. For this reason we applaud the decision of Springer Nature and Palgrave Macmillan, our publishers, to sign up to “DORA,” the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which recognizes the complexity of the issues at hand and calls for the use of multiple indicators and metrics to assess a journal’s success.
Nevertheless, we live in a world where simplistic quantitative indicators have become significant for visibility, for tenure and promotion cases, and for reputation building. They cannot be ignored. Moreover, we believe that the articles we have published are making a real difference to the field and that these successes should be documented, even if by imperfect means. For these reasons, since our founding in 2013 we have fought tooth and nail to be included in the gold standard databases of the academic world, gradually working our way from the peripheral and candidate lists to those of the knowledge core.
Our efforts have paid off. Not only is the AJCS now benchmarked as being alongside the best, but the influence of the journal and the contributions within its pages is on the record. According to the Web of Science 2020 Edition of the Journal Citation Reports,* we are ranked #36 out of 150 journals in the “Sociology” list with a 2019 impact factor of 2.21 and an Immediacy Index of 0.176. Despite our recent origins and even more recent inclusion in the database, we find ourselves positioned alongside well established and prestigious titles such as Social Problems, Theory and Society, and Journal of Marriage and the Family. In turn, the Scimago SJR and CiteScore journal impact metrics, which are based on the Elsevier’s Scopus database, rank us in the 1st quartile (Q1) of the highly competitive “Sociology and Political Science” listing. Our SJR rating, representing a weighted citation count that is sensitive to the prestige of citing journals, puts us in the top 10% out of 1225 journals in the category. Our neighbors in that ranking are again some of the most respected titles such as Poetics, Social Forces and the British Journal of Sociology.
The AJCS Editors would like to thank our contributors, reviewers, editors and readers for helping us get so far so quickly.
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* Requires a subscription or institutional access.
AJCS selected for inclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
American Journal of Cultural Sociology is happy to announce that it has been selected for inclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). A carefully selected collection of the world’s most influential social science journals, SSCI provides searchable author abstracts for the leading journals in 55 social science disciplines, with a comprehensive backfile of cited reference data from 1900 to the present. SSCI carefully curates its collection to make sure that it only includes the most influential journals in their respective fields, selecting journals that maintain editorial rigor, high citation counts, and best practices for journal operations. It monitors the titles in its list, excluding those that display unethical behavior, excessive self-citation, and citation stacking. SSCI independently calculates an impact factor for all the journals in its collection, allowing academic institutions to compare, evaluate, and rank different journals in a specific field.
Established in 2013, American Journal of Cultural Sociology publishes rigorous, meaning-centered sociological scholarship, and creates a common forum for scholars, practitioners, and researchers worldwide to follow the latest developments and debates within the field. The journal publishes empirical scholarship as well as theoretical debates, and it is open to a wide variety of approaches and perspectives in meaning-centered social analysis. The journal regularly organizes special issues and debates of pressing interest to cultural sociologists, including issues focused on measuring culture (October 2015), inequality (March 2017), the 2016 US Presidential Election (October 2017), and the cognitive turn (February 2020). The editors also work hard to maintain a speedy production process; average time from submission to initial decision is 64 days, and average time from acceptance to online publication is 30 days.
We hope you will consider American Journal of Cultural Sociology as a possible destination for your next article.
Jeffrey Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith, editors.
AJCS selected for the Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index!
We are delighted to announce that the American Journal of Cultural Sociology will now be indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Core Collection, in the new Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)!
Starting with issue 4.1 (February 2016), AJCS will be included in a new index, ESCI, which launched in 2015.
This index extends the publications discoverable in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Core Collection to include high-quality, peer-reviewed publications in emerging scientific fields and of regional importance. The Thomson Reuters Web of Science is one of the most trustworthy sources for citation counts, and AJCS’s inclusion in the ESCI provides greater discoverability for the journal and allows for real-time insight into the citation performance.
AJCS is already indexed by SCOPUS, a database listing journals and country scientific indicators and rankings. Inclusion into Web of Science within our first four years of publishing is a huge milestone!
Dedicated Book Reviews Editor appointed to AJCS
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Isaac Ariail Reed as Book Reviews Editor for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. The addition of Dr. Reed to the editorial team is a welcome expansion of the journal's activities and will broaden the scope of the conversation that AJCS promotes.
Authors interested in submitting a Book Review to AJCS should contact Dr. Reed
American Journal of Cultural Sociology accepted into Scopus
We are delighted to announce that AJCS has been accepted into Elsevier's international indexing database, Scopus. The reviewers of the title commented, “this is an outstanding journal with a great team of editors and an internationally prominent editorial board, top-notch authors, interesting papers, and a citation record that older, more established journals must envy”. We are very proud indeed of this journal, as it has only just completed its second volume and is therefore very young to be included. Our warmest congratulations and thanks to everyone involved, but particularly our team of editors.
