An Empirical Evaluation of the Editorial Practices of Social Work Journals

Perceptions of Professional Social Work Journals: Findings From a National Survey

“…Several scholars have suggested that editorial board members of social work journals may lack scholarly expertise and that the manuscript review process may refl ect some of these limitations (Lindsey, 1978(Lindsey, , 1995Pardeck, 1992). Yet, few studies have examined authors' perceptions of the social work journal manuscript review process (Thyer & Myers, 2003).…”

“…A study by Thyer and Myers (2003) overall quality, respectfulness, competency, and helpfulness. Thyer and Myers (2003) found that mean scores on overall quality of the review process for social work journals identifi ed as "core of the social work journal network" (Baker, 1992, p. 160) "Core" has been defined through network analysis (Baker, 1992) and as it relates to citations (Furr, 1995 Work Abstracts) as comprising the "core of the social work journal network" (Baker, 1992, p. 160).…”

“…Because a precise number of social work journals has yet to be determined and estimates range from 50 to 250 (Cnaan et al, 1994), the research team deemed the last two criteria too broad and relied primarily on prior research to defi ne a social work journal. Hence, the present study includes many of the journals used by Cnaan et al (1994) and Thyer and Myers (2003) as well as journals from SSCI 2000 with "social work" in the title.…”

What Happens to Our Ideas?

“…More important to us is the issue of the quality of the venue used to disseminate ideas. Despite the fact that peer review for journals can be problematic (cf., Lindsey, 1978b;1988;Pardeck & Meinart, 1999;Thyer & Myers, 2003), we would argue that it is the system that produces the highest quality results. Seipel (2003) recently examined social work academics perceptions of the relative value of different types of publication when making tenure decisions.…”

Twenty Years of Publishing Research on Social Work Practice

“…I worked very hard to acknowledge receipt of papers rapidly, to make initial decisions within 3 months, and to ensure that the reviewers' commentaries were of high quality and avoided disrespectful language. So to some extent, this was successful, as judged informally by emails, letters, and comments I have received over the years, and more formally by surveys of published authors, surveys which found that RSWP was ranked very high indeed in terms of overall quality of the editorial review process (Barker & Thyer, 2005;Thyer & Myers, 2003).…”