Socius

As an open access journal, articles accepted by Socius are freely available online immediately upon publication. All articles are rigorously peer-reviewed and brought to publication as rapidly as possible. To ensure a timely publication process, articles submitted to Socius are unlikely to go through a lengthy developmental review process with multiple rounds of revision. Reviewers are asked to evaluate manuscripts as written and revisions are not typically sent out for additional review, but are evaluated by the editorial team (see review guidelines). Almost all manuscripts will receive a final decision within one round of revision. Manuscripts are also desk rejected more frequently than at many traditional journals.

Production costs are covered by Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid by the authors (or their institutions or funding agencies) upon acceptance of their manuscripts (more information below). Authors who are not able to pay the Article Processing Charge (APC) may request a waiver of the fee.

For general information on open access at SAGE please visit the Open Access page or view our Open Access FAQs.

Editorial Process

Manuscripts are first reviewed internally by two editorial staff members who make a recommendation to the editor. At this point, a manuscript may be desk rejected by the editor if it is judged to be unlikely to be successful in peer review. Manuscripts that are not desk rejected are then sent out for review by (typically) two reviewers. Based on these reviews and recommendations, editors render a decision on the manuscript. Manuscripts are rarely accepted at this stage but may be sent back to authors to revise and resubmit. When revised manuscripts are re-submitted, they are typically evaluated directly by the editor and not sent out for additional review.

Continuous Publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no issues to fill and no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as the production process is complete. At that time it will be completely free for readers to view and download. Check the “Latest Articles” tab on the journal website for the most recent published content.

Publication Standards/Ethics

Socius accepts original research articles and data visualizations. Socius is primarily focused on articles that include empirical qualitative and/or quantitative research, but will also accept submissions that are methodological or theoretical in nature, so long as those manuscripts are written for a general sociological audience.

Consistent with the ASA code of ethics (13.05 Data Sharing), the editors encourage all authors to make their code and/or data publicly available upon publication, when possible.

Researchers submitting manuscripts should consult the ASA Code of Ethics for policies related to the ethics of the publication process. Submitting authors will be asked to confirm that the manuscript has been submitted solely to this journal and is not published, in press, or submitted elsewhere.

Publication Fees

There is a $25 submission fee for all manuscripts. This fee may not be waived. If your manuscript is accepted, you will be charged a one-time Author Processing Charge (APC). This fee covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available. Once the charge has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and will appear online within an average of 20 working days.

Author processing charges are listed below.

Any author unable to pay the APC may request and be granted a waiver after acceptance of their manuscript.
 

Data Visualization Author processing charges are listed below.

Any author unable to pay the APC may request and be granted a waiver after acceptance of their manuscript.

*The status of the lead/corresponding author will determine the APC category. Authors are expected, as stated in the ASA Code of Ethics, to ensure that principal authorship and other publication credits are based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. In claiming or determining the ordering of authorship, sociologists seek to reflect accurately the contributions of main participants in the research and writing process.

**Note that the article processing charge will be waived for authors who are ASA International Associate Members (not in the top 35 most globally competitive countries).

How to Submit Your Manuscript

All manuscripts for Socius should be submitted electronically at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/srd. Submissions by email are not accepted. For specific questions or inquiries, please email the editor at socius@uoregon.edu.

Manuscript Preparation

File types

Only electronic files conforming to the journal’s guidelines will be accepted. Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word DOC, RTF, and XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted. Please refer to the additional guidelines on submitting artwork and supplemental files, below.

Reference style

Socius manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the American Sociological Association Style Guide (seventh edition).

Manuscript style and format

The editors encourage the submission of succinct manuscripts while recognizing that different methods may necessitate different manuscript lengths. If your manuscript is over 10,000 words, please contact the managing editor (socius@uoregon.edu) before submission. Non-essential analysis and results should be presented in supplemental materials rather than the main body of the manuscript. Author(s) should refrain from indicating that some results are available upon request. Any result discussed in the manuscript should be present in the manuscript itself or in the supplementary materials.

Pages should be numbered consecutively, beginning with the page after the title page. Manuscripts should be typed for 8½” x 11” paper, double-spaced, with reasonable formatting of text to allow for ease of reading by reviewers. Figures and tables can be placed at the end of the text or inline, at the author’s preference. Sentence structure, not italics, should be used to create emphasis. Abbreviations and acronyms should be spelled out at first mention. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters should be formatted to indicate italics, boldface, superscript, and subscript. The use of notes should be minimized whenever possible. Notes are for explanations or amplifications of textual material, not for reference information.

Manuscripts must include a list of references, which should include only sources that are cited in the text. The accuracy and completeness of references and citations are the responsibility of the author(s). Reference each dataset with its title, author, date, and a persistent web identifier, such as a digital object identifier (DOI), a handle, or a uniform resource name (URN). If necessary, this last element may be replaced by a web address and an access date, although researchers are urged to use the DOI as the preferred citation. Personal communications (letters, memos, telephone conversations) are cited in the text after the name with as exact a date as possible.

All manuscripts should include an abstract of 200 words or less, followed by a list of keywords (the terms that researchers will use to find the article in indexes and databases). Abstracts should be structured to inform readers of the purpose, methods, and findings of the research or the equivalent for theoretical or non-empirical manuscripts.

Provide full contact details for the corresponding author, including email, affiliation, mailing address, and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations and short author biographies (up to 150 words) are required for all co-authors. These details should be presented in a separate title page file, to facilitate anonymous peer review.

One high-quality electronic version of each figure must be submitted with the manuscript that is to be typeset. Tables will be typeset. Figures supplied in color will appear in color online. For additional guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures, and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

Photographic illustrations should be rendered with at least 300 dpi; please use CMYK color conversion if possible. Graphs made with Office software such as Microsoft Excel can be provided in their original format to facilitate conversion into printable format with preserved quality. Any other line graphs/illustrations should preferably be provided in EPS format with a resolution of at least 600 dpi to prevent ragged lines when printed. A figure image should be at least 160 mm in width at the appropriate resolution. For further guidance on how to prepare your digital image see http://art.cadmus.com/da/index.jsp.

Researchers need to address conflicts of interest, human subjects protection, and data sharing in accordance with ASA’s standards for reporting on research in ASA publications.

Socius encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

To comply with the guidance for research funders, authors and publishers issued by the Research Information Network (RIN), Socius additionally requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit Funding Acknowledgment on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state in your acknowledgments that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

This journal is able to host approved supplemental materials online, alongside the full text of articles. Supplemental files will be subjected to peer-review together with the article. For more information please refer to SAGE’s Guidelines for Authors on Supplemental Files.

Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications may consider using the services offered by SAGE Language Services. Visit SAGE Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.

Visualization Submissions

Visualization submissions are evaluated based on two characteristics. First, the visualization should provide a visually appealing display of information following accepted principles of data visualization. The visualization should be self-explanatory without reference to the text. Second, visualizations must illustrate an interesting and worthwhile sociological finding.

Visualization submissions should include two parts. The main article will be a single figure (i.e. something that could be viewed on a single screen/page) and approximately 500 words (excluding caption & references) of expository text that highlights what is interesting and important about the figure. Socius prefers substantial captions that help to make the figure fully legible to the reader without reference to the text.  Legends and label axes should also convey information on measurement in an intuitive and accessible fashion. In addition, author(s) should include a supplementary information file that contains details about the data and methods used to generate the figure. The supplementary file has no page limits and serves to provide methods and background for the work. At minimum, the supplemental file should provide methodological information of sufficient detail for readers to judge the veracity of the figure, reasonableness of the methods, and soundness of the conclusions drawn from the figure. To that end, we strongly encourage author(s) to include code or post data that would allow others to replicate the work as well as discussion of aesthetic/display choices involved in producing the figure. The supplemental information file can also include background literature or other information author(s) think relevant to include. Socius will not copy-edit the supplementary information file.

Blinding

Socius implements a double-blind peer review process. The complete title of the article and the name(s) of the author(s) should be provided only in a separate cover-page file to ensure anonymity in the review process. The text should have no author names but may carry a short article title at the top. Names of authors in citations and references should not be blinded; however, information in text that would identify those references as belonging to the author should be deleted from the manuscript (e.g., text citations of “my previous work,” especially when accompanied by a self-citation; a preponderance of the author’s own work in the reference list). These elements may be reinserted in the final draft. Information that could help identify any author (e.g., mention of any affiliation) should also be removed. Citations and references to undistributed work, as long as it is unsearchable on the web, should be blinded using “Author” and realphabetized in the reference list. The author’s name should be removed from the document’s Properties.

Proofs

Socius will email a PDF of the proofs to the corresponding author. Any accompanying queries should be answered as soon as possible so that publication is not delayed. The PDF of your article will be available for download on the journal website after publication. Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process.

We value your feedback to ensure that we continue to improve our author service. Upon publication, all corresponding authors will receive a brief survey questionnaire on your experience of publishing in Socius with Sage.

Contributor’s Publishing Agreement

Before publication, the author will be required as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Socius publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard Socius license is Creative Commons by Attribution NonCommerical (CC BY-NC), which allows others to reuse the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced and the use is noncommercial. For more information, you are advised to visit SAGE’s OA licenses page.

Alternative license arrangements are available at the author’s request (e.g., to meet particular funder mandates).

Socius and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism, or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of articles published in the journal. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked using duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyrighted material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgment, or where authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action, including but not limited to publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article (removing it from the journal); or taking appropriate legal action.

Permissions

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. If authors are using their own work, they will still be required to obtain permission if they did not retain copyright of the previously published work. Papers will not be accepted for publication without the correct permissions. For further information, including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

Name Change Policy

SAGE has introduced a policy to enable name and pronoun changes for our authors. ASA journals published by SAGE follow this policy. Going forward, all requests to make a name or pronoun change will be honored. This includes, but is not limited to, name changes because of marriage, divorce, gender affirmation, and religious conversion. For more information, read SAGE’s Name Change Policy. 

ORCID

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process SAGE is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.

The collection of ORCID iDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID iD please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

All authors who would like to include an ORCID iD with the publication should submit that information at the submission stage.