Special Journal Issue

[adel9216]

Hello,

so I am organizing a conference within this huuuuge congress where I live (my proposal got accepted a few weeks ago). I was wondering if I could also coordinate a special issue of an academic journal (doesn't have to be a prestigious one) as a follow-up of the conference..? How does that work? Can PhD students do that?

[traductio]

It's possible, yes. I'd talk to potential contributors first to gauge interest, and then talk to a journal editor.

But it's also a huge, huge time commitment, far more than I'd encourage any of my PhD students to undertake. I've edited themed issues before, and half the contributors will send mediocre work, if they send it at all, and you'll spend all your time chasing them down. Twenty percent of the contributors will take 80 percent of your time, and all that work will take away from your courses or dissertation.

[adel9216]

It's possible, yes. I'd talk to potential contributors first to gauge interest, and then talk to a journal editor.

But it's also a huge, huge time commitment, far more than I'd encourage any of my PhD students to undertake. I've edited themed issues before, and half the contributors will send mediocre work, if they send it at all, and you'll spend all your time chasing them down. Twenty percent of the contributors will take 80 percent of your time, and all that work will take away from your courses or dissertation.

I was thinking of sending out a call for papers to avoid that a little bit..

[traductio]

It's possible, yes. I'd talk to potential contributors first to gauge interest, and then talk to a journal editor.

But it's also a huge, huge time commitment, far more than I'd encourage any of my PhD students to undertake. I've edited themed issues before, and half the contributors will send mediocre work, if they send it at all, and you'll spend all your time chasing them down. Twenty percent of the contributors will take 80 percent of your time, and all that work will take away from your courses or dissertation.

I was thinking of sending out a call for papers to avoid that a little bit..

It will still be a huge time-sink.

One reason to line up potential contributors beforehand is to make a more persuasive case to the journal editor. If you're a PhD student, you won't yet have the credibility to convince an editor you'll be able to pull it off.

But in my experience, it's difficult to overstate the frustrations a large percentage of your authors will cause you.

[Hegemony]

A call for papers might produce good papers, but that doesn't mean those will turn into good articles.  Or that the articles will come in on time.  Or that the authors won't take offense when you ask for revisions.  Or that the revisions will come in on time.  Or that any of it will come in correctly formatted.  The reformatting alone will take many hours and weeks of your time.  You can't ask the authors to reformat, because that means they will take months and months to get the supposedly reformatted articles back to you, and then when they do come back, they will merely be incorrectly formatted in a different way.  I have recently edited two separate volumes, comprising twenty articles, all by established academics, and only one of those came in correctly formatted.  Also only one of the twenty came in on time.  (It was the correctly formatted one.)  The others were up to a year late. 

If you have a lot of extra time on your hands, write a second book.  That will take no more time than editing a volume, and will get you a lot further in your career.

[Bede the Vulnerable]

It's possible, yes. I'd talk to potential contributors first to gauge interest, and then talk to a journal editor.

But it's also a huge, huge time commitment, far more than I'd encourage any of my PhD students to undertake. I've edited themed issues before, and half the contributors will send mediocre work, if they send it at all, and you'll spend all your time chasing them down. Twenty percent of the contributors will take 80 percent of your time, and all that work will take away from your courses or dissertation.

I was thinking of sending out a call for papers to avoid that a little bit..

It will still be a huge time-sink.

One reason to line up potential contributors beforehand is to make a more persuasive case to the journal editor. If you're a PhD student, you won't yet have the credibility to convince an editor you'll be able to pull it off.

But in my experience, it's difficult to overstate the frustrations a large percentage of your authors will cause you.

What traductio and Hegemony said.  I've never done this for a journal.  But my experience with a Festschrift was comparable.  I know that some of the "contributors" never get their contributions in; others submit pieces that they couldn't get published elsewhere because it isn't their best work. 

I will probably do this again, this time for my mentor:  I'm the "dean" of his doctoral students, and that's how it works.  But I can afford to take the time now.  When I was a PhD student?  Nope.

[polly_mer]

As others wrote, your time can be better spent in many other ways than shepherding a special issue at this point in your career.  I will mention that generally one is already a prominent person in the field who is doing this particular service to the field this year; one does not make one's name by editing a special issue.  In a brand-new field, one can make one's name by being a trendsetter and then doing service to the field, but grad students don't become leaders by doing this type of service.


In addition to underestimating how much work is required, the influence one has as organizer is generally much, much less as a newcomer to the field than when one is as a solid contributor whom "everyone" knows.  Being able to call individuals up and use an appropriate cajoling/threat/negotiation is harder when one doesn't have at least a couple years of shared experience so that one knows which technique will be most effective (or can call someone else to find out) and one can draw on favors owed or other parts of a longer-term investment as people in the same community.

[fast_and_bulbous]

I just did a special issue as invited guest editor for a mid-tier journal in my field. Yes, it was a big time sink and it's something that I won't do again easily. It will make a line on the CV, that's it.

I started out inviting about 30 scholars in the topic area, which I chose, got about 10 bites and in the end it contained a total of 6 articles, only a couple of which I thought were very interesting. I'm glad to have had the experience but won't jump at this kind of thing again.

[adel9216]

Thanks everyone for your input, I had not realized this.

[Parasaurolophus]

It's also a lot easier to do once you know a lot of people in your field personally. Knowing you, they'll feel more obliged to get their stuff in on time.

But yeah, I don't think it's worth your time. I love special issues, and I love submitting to them, but the personal returns on your investment are really tiny (for organizing one).

[traductio]

A call for papers might produce good papers, but that doesn't mean those will turn into good articles.  Or that the articles will come in on time.  Or that the authors won't take offense when you ask for revisions.  Or that the revisions will come in on time.  Or that any of it will come in correctly formatted.  The reformatting alone will take many hours and weeks of your time.  You can't ask the authors to reformat, because that means they will take months and months to get the supposedly reformatted articles back to you, and then when they do come back, they will merely be incorrectly formatted in a different way.  I have recently edited two separate volumes, comprising twenty articles, all by established academics, and only one of those came in correctly formatted.  Also only one of the twenty came in on time.  (It was the correctly formatted one.)  The others were up to a year late.

I never cease to be amazed by people's inability to format chapters correctly. I'm not talking obscure formatting -- I'm talking Chicago author-date style. And then I fix the formatting for peer review (for a book in this case), and beg people to edit the correctly formatted version when they make their corrections (and highlight those instructions with capital letters and neon lights), and still they fail to send the correct version. And I can't ask them to correct their formatting because their paper is already six months late, but I don't want to alienate myself from them in this small field where I work.

(And it's always the one who sends the chapter in on time who formats correctly, and that's because that's the one person who pays attention to details.)

[Dr_Badger]

IMHO, one of the hardest thing about academic professionalization is recognizing "opportunities" that will suck the life out of you without paying off. Guest editing a special issue and publishing an edited collection are two opportunities to be avoided at this stage in your career.

For reasons that others have outlined, you could have a much harder time launching such a project now than you will have when you are a more established scholar. Some search committees and tenure committees might not give much weight to editorial work. Some colleagues might even view editorial work as "service", not research. I'm afraid "service" won't help you get a job or promotion to tenure. It would be better to spend that time and energy publishing articles. 

Speaking of publishing articles: Publishing in a special issue of a journal is a fine way to establish your scholarly reputation! Also, special issues often emerge from or evolve into conference panels. Keep your eyes open and ears to the ground for any special issues emerging from the conference that you attended. Then, you can take advantage of that opportunity to develop your conference paper into a journal article. Let the more senior folks worry about screening proposals, assigning reviewers, making spreadsheets to track the status of each article and other boring stuff.