Celebrating Our 25th Anniversary: Research on Social Work Practice Is Becoming Bigger and Better

This January 2015 issue marks the 25th anniversary of the initial publication of Research on Social Work Practice (RSWP). For some readers, the journal has been present throughout their entire professional lives. However, back in the late 1980s, one heard frequent complaints over the poor quality and excessive length of time the peer review process took among the existing stable of social work journals. Once accepted, it often took 2 or more years for an article to appear in print, and print was the only option back then. Much of what was published was of little relevance to the world of social work practice, and much was of poor quality. Social work journal impact factors (IFs) were either nonexistent or very low, and often journal issues appeared quite late after their scheduled publication date. With these factors in mind, I submitted a proposal for a new journal to the staff at Sage Publications. Marquita Flemming, a senior editor at Sage, gave me a sympathetic ear during a 1989 conference in New Orleans and subsequently pitched the idea to management. Sage conducted a national survey of social work Deans and Directors asking them what they thought of a new journal devoted to intervention research and the responses were very positive. In due course, I was offered a contract to edit the new journal, and I began assembling a high-quality review board, and drafted peer review policies designed to mirror those found in prestigious behavioral science and practice journals. The journal adopted a few innovative policies. One was that reviews were shared, not just with the author of the submitted article, but also with the reviewers who could see the other critiques and my decision letter. This helped keep me honest and ensured that I followed their recommendations. For years, the editorial board members have self-selected the papers they reviewed, and could space them out according to their own schedule. This was in contrast to other social work journals which often sent reviewers five or more submissions at once and asked for them all to be reviewed within a couple of weeks, an impossible task to do well. Unlike many mainstream journals that rely on an old-boy/old-girl network of patronage and personal relationships to select people to the editorial board, every 3 years RSWP publishes an open call for selfnominations from individuals who wish to serve on the journal’s editorial board, and almost the entire board is replaced. This helps promote a greater diversity of intellectual talent available to help screen submissions. The journal has never imposed an arbitrary page limit on its submissions, preferring to rely on the reviewers to suggest superfluous content for deletion. As a result, our articles are somewhat longer than those published in other journals. Since January 1991, the journal has never had a late issue, and it has published hundreds of original research articles, guest articles (some of which are among the journal’s most highly cited ones), book reviews, and occasional special issues. Back in the early 1990s, my most ambitious hope was that the journal would eventually get 1,000 subscribers. Things took a leap in that direction when the Society for Social Work and Research polled its members and asked them to vote on whether or not to increase their SSWR dues in return for getting a print subscription to RSWP. This was approved by a large majority of SSWR members and the board of directors subsequently provided RSWP as a membership benefit as of 1999 (Thyer, 2006). Additionally, the Internet made it possible to later provide electronic subscriptions at a reduced cost, and despite the decision of SSWR to discontinue RSWP as a membership benefit in 2012, SSWR members can still obtain a subscription to RSWP for the remarkably low price of US$27.00 a year (see https://secured.sagepub.com/rswp.html)! In 2013, the journal was received by over 8,000 subscribers. Its IF is also quite impressive. Table 1 depicts the IFs for selected social work journals for the past 2 years, as reported by the Journal Citation Reports (JCI), where RSWP has been at or near the top for some time. There are some other journals with higher IFs, erroneously listed in the JCI as social work journals (e.g., American Journal of Community Psychology), but among the real social work journals, RSWP’s IF has consistently exceeded that of major outlets such as the NASW’s Social Work, Social Work Research, and the CSWE’s Journal