As the flagship peer-reviewed and open access journal of the North Carolina Sociological Association, Sociation (formerly Sociation Today) is dedicated to advancing the goals of the organization to “stimulate and improve research, instruction and discussion, to encourage cooperative relations among persons engaged in the scientific study of society, and to encourage cooperative relations between academic sociology and other agencies with related interests.”
Originally founded in 2003, Sociation was the first web-based sociological journal sponsored by a professional society with a mission to provide concise journal articles, accessible to professionals, students, and the general population. From its inception, Sociation published articles covering a broad range of topics, with a strong focus on sociology.
Sociation continues to maintain its commitment to an open access platform that makes scholarly inquiry readily and widely available to scholars, students, practitioners, and the general public. Submissions should consider these different audiences when submitting their work and are encouraged to write in an accessible and non-technical way whenever possible. While the journal is fashioned as a general interest sociology journal, the open access platform allows for a diversity of contributions in terms of both style and content. Thus, we encourage traditional article submissions as well as short research notes, teaching notes and lesson guides, review articles, policy papers, and replications and reanalysis of existing work.
Sociation also accepts book reviews, highlighting academic books published by North Carolina-based authors. We encourage authors to focus their reviews on books published within the past three years that have not been adequately reviewed in major sociological publications.
Given the organization’s focus on stimulating and improving research and cooperation, we are dedicated to a constructive peer-review process where referees not only judge the scientific rigor and quality of the contribution but seek to identify each manuscript’s potential and encourage authors to develop and improve their specific paper and ideas regardless of the specific editorial decision. Sociation’s editorial staff is also committed to a timely and expedited review process where initial editorial review and decisions (e.g. desk reject) occurs within 2 weeks of submission and final decisions are made within 8 weeks of submission.
Sociation is dedicated to the principles of open science. Authors are strongly encouraged to share replication data and code as part of their submissions and, upon publication, on the journal’s website. In lieu of this, authors should provide information on third party repositories where data and reproduction code are stored or provide justification for why the data cannot be made readily available and how scholars can inquire about gaining access.