INTRODUCTION
The editorial team for the Journal of Political Science Education has now been running the journal for the last four years with support from APSA and specifically from Jon Gurstelle, Director of Publications at APSA. In our fourth year working on the journal the process has gone well and we have a good team of managing editors and editorial assistants at the University at Albany, Auburn University and Roger Williams University.
Table 1 Authors by Gender
Parentheses–Percentage of Total including coauthors, all original submissions
Table 2 Authors by Rank
Parentheses–Percentage of Total including coauthors, all original submissions
Table 3 Authors by Country of Submission
Parentheses–Percentage of Total including coauthors, all original submissions
Table 4 Authors by Type of Institution
Parentheses–Percentage of Total including coauthors, all original submissions
Table 5 Types of Submission
Parentheses–Percentage of Total, all original submissions
Table 6 Manuscript Decision (Original Submissions)
* This is the percentage of all rejected manuscripts, not of all new manuscripts Parentheses–Percentage of Total, all original submissions
Table 7 Reviewer Statistics
Table 8 Average Reviewer Turnaround Time
Table 9 Top Reviewers for JPSE
Table 10 Editorial Board by Gender
Parentheses–Percentage of Total
Table 11 Editorial Board by Country
Table 12 Editorial Board by Rank
Table 13 Editorial Board by Institution
Table 14 Current Citation Rights
Table 15 Comparison
HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR FOURTH YEAR
Now ending the fourth year of our running of the JPSE as an APSA-wide journal we have seen submissions go up. This year we received 10.6% percent more submissions than last year. We are getting a good amount of submissions from authors for all four sections of the journal with the most going to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) section, then Political Science Instruction, then Books, Teaching Tools, & Educational Resources and Reflections on Teaching and the Academy. In the past year, we have made progress on our effort to be more involved in social media with our twitter handle (@JPSE_Editors) tweeting out articles as they are released and other pedagogy related issues. That being said, we plan to make the twitter handle more active in this coming year and hopefully increase our follower count. Last year at this time we had 300 followers and this year we have 582 followers. Our decision last year to forgo special issues given that we often did not get enough submissions on time to fill the issue has not harmed submissions to the journal at all. We believe our decision to go with special sections instead has been successful. An example of a very useful special section is “Careers in Political Science at Community Colleges” that appeared in Volume 16 Issue 1.
This last year for published articles 52% of the authors are women (see Table 1). In terms of the rank of the authors of published articles we have a wide diversity receiving submissions from all ranks of professors as well as lecturers, students and administrative personnel. We have received the most submissions from assistant professors (29%) followed closely by associate professors (25%). The majority of our submissions come from public universities (58%), followed by private universities (32%). Impressively, every single reviewer asked in this past year has said yes to doing a review. In terms of publicizing the journal we will once again have a “meet the editors” roundtable at this year’s APSA Annual Meeting. In sum, our team has enjoyed this year and we are looking forward to continuing to grow the journal and its outreach as an APSA-wide journal.
STAFFING
Our staff at the Journal of Political Science Education consists of five co-editors who are using a portion of their time to work as a team as well as specifically on their own section of the journal. Three student managing editors and three editorial assistants work part time on the journal. Our current managing editors are Waffah Ahmed, Mirren Galway, and Olivia Vecchio who will be continuing this year. All three managing editors are students at the University at Albany, SUNY. Tatevik Khachatryan and Chiara Sinigaglia, students at Roger Williams University and Stephanie Bickerstaff at Auburn University, are currently serving as editorial assistants and will continue to do so this coming year.
PRODUCTION AND DELIVERY
Author Demographics
The demographic distribution of the Journal of Political Science Education authors are reported in tables 1, 2, and 3. Currently 52% of our article authors are women and 48% are men —an almost even split. Our articles’ authors are spread across different ranks with assistant professors being responsible for more submissions than any other rank again this year with 29% of articles. Tenured faculty are responsible for 41% of articles which is a 10% increase from the previous year. As one can see from the table 3, 14.5% of our submissions were from international authors, an increase of 1.7% in international submissions from the previous year. Like last year, submissions came from eight countries other than the United States. Table 4 shows the distribution of authors by type of institution for accepted papers.
Content and Treatment of Manuscripts
Table 5 shows the percentage of articles submitted that were directed at being submitted as original articles (both SoTL and Political Science Instruction sections), review articles, and reflection articles. The number of manuscripts submitted has increased from 81 last year to 84 this year. Table 6 shows the manuscript decisions for manuscripts. Our current rejection rate is 31%—the same as last year. Table 7 presents information on reviewer statistics. The percentage of completed reviews has increased from 66% last year to 100% this year. Table 8 provides data on average reviewer turnaround time. This year on average, our editorial board’s turn around rate was around 47 days while the reviewer turnaround time was about 42 days. ■
