It seems to be a good one. We may have to change the paper to insist much more on the mixed methods aspects.
DO you want to try something in CS?
Yes, the letter is signed by the same guy who refused our LATEX submission because “he had never seen one before”:
If that’s OK, it could be a good shot. My PhD supervisor told me that this is not the done thing in economics, but this is a different country.
As for the JMMR itself, it looks attractive. Are we sure SSNA is a mixed method, though? An editorial states:
Multiple methods research refers to all the various combinations of methods that include in a substantive way more than one data collection procedure. (emphasis mine)
Maybe I am being fastidious here, but I don’t feel like we are employing multiple data collection procedures. Data are ethnographic data, they may or may not have collected in different ways. What we do is processing in a semi-quantitative way.
Not sure… the whole thing is a mixed method. What the journal has to say is:
Original research manuscripts identify a methodological contribution and report empirical mixed methods research in the social, behavioral, health, arts, and human sciences to illustrate the methodological contribution. These manuscripts must:
- fit the definition of mixed methods research by collecting and analyzing data, integrating the findings, and drawing overall interpretations or metainferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods;
- integrate explicitly the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study; and
- discuss how the manuscript makes a novel contribution both to the literature on mixed methods research, and to a substantive area in the scholar’s field of inquiry. (source)
(“Integration” seems to be a key word).
The only thing our manuscript does not do is the third (which even has a mandated place, a section in the discussion called “Contribution to the Field of Mixed Methods Research Methodology" - source). We would need to reference something that the JMMR considers as “the mixed methods literature”. Any expertise here? @Richard perhaps?
In other news, the word limit is generous, 10,000 words (we are at ~ 6,500).
For the others:
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International Journal of Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods boasts an impact factor of over 7, but I find it a bit mysterious. For one, it charges a publication fee. It seems to be OA, but then the first random article that I looked up was this, which is simply a linear regression used to compute the effect on Nigerian GDP of foreign direct investment. What’s the methodological novelty here?
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International Journal of Social Research Methodology - not open access, the embargo for Green OA is too long (18 months), and gold OA is about 3K EUR.
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Methodological Innovations – OA, publication fee (400 USD). Page limit is ok, 9,000 words. Cannot see impact factor.
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Sociological Methods & Research
Why not? Do you have something in mind?
Not off the top of my head but I should be able to find something.
What about Sociological Methods & Research? IF of 6.933. Gold OA is expensive (USD 3K) but there’s no mention of an embargo for Green OA. No word length specified but I did a word count of a random article and it was 10,000 words. And we don’t have to worry about whether SSNA is a mixed method.
Your supervisor is right! I would not be happy to do this.
I like this idea. Submission guidelines are a bit thin on the ground, though, and I have not been able to find a LaTEX template.
Also, submission requires you name six possible reviewers.
@bpinaud , @melancon, @jan: if you agree, I can take the lead for a submission to Sociological Methods & Research. @Richard, could you advise me on how (and if) to change the manuscript content-wise?
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Hi @alberto. Sorry for being dense but I can’t find the final editable version of our paper. Could you send me a link and I’ll read it again - through a sociologist’s eyes - tomorrow (Monday).
Hi @alberto
I’ve read through the article again with a view to submitting it to SM&R. As anthropology and sociology (at least the type of sociology I do) are closely related, I don’t think we need to change much but I have tried to make the links to sociology clearer. I’ve added my edits to the document, as follows:
Section 33: I reordered the list of keywords to prioritise sociology.
Section 41: I changed ‘who are deeply immersed in the studied cultures’ to ‘who are deeply immersed in the studied societies and cultures’.
Section 55: I changed ‘in anthropology and its chief method, ethnography’ to ‘in ethnography, one of the key methods of sociology and anthropology’.
Section 346: I changed ‘Determining association depth is in its essence a method of uncovering the structure of culture (discourse or thought), a task placed in the center of anthropology most prominently by Claude Levi-Strauss. His classical works Anthropologie structurale and La Pensée sauvage initiated a whole host of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches’ to ‘Determining association depth is in its essence a method of uncovering the structure of a society or culture. Key works in anthropology \textit{Anthropologie structurale} \citep{levi1958anthropologie} and \textit{La Pensée sauvage} \citep{levi1962pensee} and in social theory ((Altusser, Pulantzas - refs below)) initiated a whole host of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches’.
((References to add: Althusser L (1969) For Marx. Penguin Press; Poulantzas N (1973) On social classes. New Left Review. 1978: 27-54)) @alberto - I couldn’t work out how to add refs. Can I leave this with you?
Section 350: I changed ‘For anthropologists, the concept of association breadth is most closely associated with network analysis, an approach whose classical formulations came from Jeremy Boissevain and his followers \citep{boissevain2018network}’ to ‘For sociologists and anthropologists, the concept of association breadth is most closely associated with the study of networks, with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social capital ((Bourdieu and Wacquant - ref below)) and Jeremy Boissevain’s research on network analysis among the most influential \citep{boissevain2018network}.’
((Reference to add: Bourdieu P and Wacquant L (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. University of Chicago Press))
Section 354: I changed ‘No culture is fully integrated and each is subjected to centripetal and centrifugal forces simultaneously. As a result, even in the most “homogenous” cultures one can identify at least embryonic subcultures or – in another formulation – for every hegemony there is a budding or fully articulated counter-hegemony’ to ‘No society or culture is fully integrated and each is subjected to centripetal and centrifugal forces simultaneously. As a result, even in the most “homogenous” societies and cultures one can identify at least embryonic subcultures or – in another formulation – for every hegemony there is a budding or fully articulated counter-hegemony.’
Everyone, let me know what you think.
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Looks great, @Richard.
I will reach out to the journal as I am confused about whether we can keep the SAGE LaTEX template.
This is now done. UPDATE: they already replied, we can use the SAGE LaTEX template that the paper already is in. Please remember we should indicate six names of possible reviewers:
The cover letter should contain all authors’ names and contact information as well as the names of six possible reviewers, with their institutional affiliations and email addresses, excluding persons who are mentors, students, coauthors, or who have any other close connection to the author(s). […
Recommended reviewers should be experts in their fields and should be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Please be aware of any conflicts of interest when recommending reviewers. Examples of conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) the below:
· The reviewer should have no prior knowledge of your submission
· The reviewer should not have recently collaborated with any of the authors
· Reviewer nominees from the same institution as any of the authors are not permitted
More for @jan, @richard and possibly @melancon.
UPDATE:
It’s done!
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The LSE Department of Methodology would be a good place to find reviewers. There are quite a few computational social scientists:
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Hello all, today I prepared a new version of the anonymized manuscript that incorporates @richard’s latest edits, and created a new draft submission on the submission website of SR&M. It’s still in draft, because I am missing a couple of things.
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I need a short bio for each author:
[…] a brief biographical paragraph describing each author’s current affiliation, research interests, and recent publications, should accompany the manuscript.
I am not sure where to put those paragraphs. There is not dedicated space in the six (!) tabs of the submission. In the cover letter maybe?
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I also need one more name of a possible reviewer (we are supposed to indicate six, Richard already proposed five):
- Finally: what should go in the cover letter? Other than the indication of the six possible reviewers, it seems to me that the submission website makes the cover letter somehow unnecessary. Any experience?
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Richard Mole is Professor of Political Sociology at UCL. His research focuses the relationship between identity and power, with particular reference to nationalism, sexualities and migration. He is the editor of Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe (2021) and Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities (2019).
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UC San Diego Department of Computational Social Science has some potential reviewers.
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I never know what to put in cover letters. Yes, I think you can put the suggested referees.
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Hello Alberto,
Thanks for all the (dirty) work.
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Bruno Pinaud received his PhD in computer science from “University of Nantes, France”
in 2006. Since 2008, he is an associate professor in computer science at “University de Bor-
deaux”. His work has focused on data and network science especially visual analytics, graph rewriting systems modelling and visualization and experimental evaluation. -
Ulrik Brandes (ubrandes@ethz.ch)
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You can also add that this work is an extension of a communication to a conference with a bunch of new material. I did not look at the submission site. But, the cover letter is usually sent to the reviewers (so not good for an anonymized submission).Often, the bios are used for publication and not for review
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Good point. I’ll need to write to them.
Actually, they do not send the cover letter to reviewers:
The cover letter should contain all authors’ names and contact information as well as the names of six possible reviewers, with their institutional affiliations and email addresses, excluding persons who are mentors, students, coauthors, or who have any other close connection to the author(s).
So, we are ready to go. For @Jan I have found this:
Jan Kubik is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and the incoming Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
But @melancon has a bit of a weird home page at Labri. Seems out of date: https://www.labri.fr/perso/melancon/doku.php?id=short_bio
How about
Guy Melançon is a mathematician and computer scientist. His work focuses on network analytics and visual analytics, with a view to democratizing the access to data science. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Bordeaux, and serves as the university’s vice president for digital.
Guy, do you approve?
I’ll describe myself as
Alberto Cottica is an economist. His work focuses on network models of knowledge exchange and generation in online communities. He is currently the director of research at Edgeryders OÜ.
Final thing. @bpinaud, are you sure this paper is not too sociological for Brandes’s interests?
Jan Kubik is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Professor of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London.
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Maybe yes. I tried to propose one name. However, we do not submit to a pure CS journal. Having a reviewer with the expertise on SNA could be a good point for us.
Submission done, with manuscript ID SMR-22-0034.