Please direct any questions to the LSJ co-editors:
- Robert Bruno, School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois.
- Victor Devinatz, Department of Management & Quantitative Methods, Illinois State University.
CLICK THE TYPEWRITER FOR LABOR STUDIES JOURNAL SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES
REVIEW PROCESS
Publication decisions are the prerogative of the coeditors and are made with the advice of a panel of qualified reviewers. All papers are assigned to one of LSJ ‘s two coeditors who selects three reviewers. One reviewer is typically a member of the LSJ Editorial Board.
All submissions are subject to blind review. Reviewers are asked to provide detailed and constructive comments that evaluate the manuscript along five dimensions:
- Theoretical rationale: the degree to which the manuscript makes adequate use of the extant literature to frame the issue under study and develop hypotheses.
- Adequacy of methods: the degree to which the manuscript details data collection procedures and the nature of the information collected as well as any qualitative or quantitative methods used to test hypotheses.
- Orderly presentation: the degree to which the manuscript is governed by a coherent format and exposition that helps the reader understand the logic that governed development of the research and informs its conclusions.
- Accessibility to practitioners: the degree to which the manuscript is free from disciplinary jargon and methodological detail only of interest to people with advanced specialized training.
- Contribution to the literature: the degree to which the manuscript addresses an important topic of interest to LSJ’s readers and brings new data, methods, or perspective to the issue under study.
Novelty of topic, clarity of presentation, and accessibility to a general audience tend to take priority over strong theoretical rationale and methodological sophistication in reaching summary recommendations about manuscripts. Reviewers may recommend that a paper be accepted, rejected, or revised and resubmitted for further review. We ask that reviewers complete their evaluation of a manuscript within six to eight weeks. All reviewer comments are forwarded to the authors (without revealing the reviewer’s identity) along with a cover letter from the coeditor explaining their decision.
Authors who are advised that their manuscript must be revised and reevaluated are required to provide a document detailing their response to each reviewer’s comment upon resubmission. Revised manuscripts are returned to the original reviewers for additional comment with the expectation that a final decision about publication will be made during this second review. On rare occasion a third review may be required.