Dialogue Studies

About Dialogue Studies

About Dialogue Studies — A Book Series, Not a Journal

An important clarification comes first: Dialogue Studies is not a journal. It is a scholarly book series published by John Benjamins Publishing Company (Amsterdam/Philadelphia), carrying the series abbreviation DS and the series ISSN 1875-1792. It is edited by Edda Weigand. Because some databases and directories have listed it alongside journals, profiles of it sometimes carry journal-style metadata (volume counts, citation metrics); those should be read with caution. As a book series, it has no impact factor, no SJR quartile and no article processing charges — it publishes books: monographs and, most often, edited collections.

The series takes the notion of dialogicity as its central concept. Its programme starts from the classical view of "language as dialogically directed" — the idea that utterances are fundamentally oriented toward an interlocutor, and that meaning emerges in interaction — and from there encompasses every type of language use: workaday (everyday), institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of language use, the series aims to give the growing interdisciplinary field of dialogue studies a coherent publishing home.

Scope and Intellectual Programme

Dialogue Studies is deliberately interdisciplinary. Its volumes draw on linguistics and pragmatics (discourse analysis, conversation analysis, speech-act and dialogue theory), philosophy (philosophy of language, ethics of communication), sociology and anthropology (interaction in institutional settings), communication studies, education, and literary studies (dialogue in narrative and drama). The unifying thread is not a method but an object: dialogue in the broad sense — spoken interaction, written exchange, mediated communication, and the dialogic structure of texts.

Typical topics across the series include: the theory of dialogue and dialogic action; dialogue in everyday conversation among family and friends; institutional dialogue — political debates, medical interviews, courtroom interaction, service encounters; dialogue in and across media; dialogic ethics; the linguistics of specific languages' conversational practices (volumes have treated dialogue in Spanish, in Middle English drama, and other languages and periods); irony, narrativity, discourse markers, coherence, conflict and expectation in interaction; and the application of dialogue research to public engagement with science and collaborative research. The series' own description stresses that the field it serves is growing precisely because scholars from so many disciplines have converged on interaction as their object of study.

Representative Volumes

The series had reached at least volume 30 by 2018, indicating a steady publication rhythm of roughly two to three books a year since its launch around the end of the 2000s. Representative titles illustrate its range:

Dialogue across Media (edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas; Dialogue Studies 28, 2017) examines how dialogue works when it is mediated — across print, broadcast and digital media — bringing narratology and media linguistics into conversation with dialogue theory. Dialogic Ethics (edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren; Dialogue Studies 30, 2018) takes up the ethical dimension of dialogue, treating ethics not as a set of rules applied to communication from outside but as something constituted in dialogic interaction. An earlier volume (Dialogue Studies 12, 2011) developed an integrated theoretical framework for "enacting dialogue" across three domains — planned communication, public engagement with science, and collaborative research — and then worked through the epistemological, methodological and ethical questions that arise when researchers try to theorise and analyse dialogic knowledge production. Dialogue in Spanish collects original studies of dialogue in Spanish-speaking contexts, covering personal interaction as well as public speech — political debates, medical interviews, court translation and service encounters — with attention to irony, narrativity, discourse markers, coherence and conflict. Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama applies the frameworks of historical sociopragmatics and dialogue analysis to medieval English cycle plays, examining pronouns and terms of address, modal markers, performatives and question–answer sequences — and, on a second communicative level, the plays' "dialogue" with their audiences.

Together these volumes show the series' characteristic profile: thematically edited collections that gather specialists around a problem, usually growing out of conference panels, symposia or research networks, alongside the occasional monograph. Each volume is assigned its own ISBN and is published in hardback and electronic editions.

Publication Details

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam (with a North American office in Philadelphia). Series abbreviation: DS. Series ISSN: 1875-1792. Series editor: Edda Weigand. Individual volumes carry their own ISBNs (for example, 978-90-272-1045-6 for the hardback of Dialogue across Media) and are distributed through the publisher's e-platform (jbe-platform.com), academic booksellers and library suppliers worldwide, in both print (hardback) and e-book formats. Volumes are priced as scholarly books — retail listings for recent volumes fall roughly in the US$95–120 range for hardback, with e-book licensing for libraries handled through the publisher's institutional channels.

John Benjamins is one of the principal academic publishers in linguistics and communication studies, and Dialogue Studies sits within a large programme of Benjamins book series (currently more than seventy active series). The publisher's catalogue page for the series lists its full description and the volumes published to date; each volume has its own catalogue page with table of contents, abstracts and ordering information, and DOIs are assigned at the chapter level (e.g., 10.1075/ds.30.toc for front matter), which makes individual chapters citable.

Editorial Process and How to Propose a Volume

Book series do not run on manuscript submission systems the way journals do. Volumes in Dialogue Studies typically originate as proposals to the series editor: an editor or author approaches Edda Weigand (via the publisher) with a prospectus describing the volume's theme, its rationale, the contributors and chapter structure, and the intended audience. The series editor evaluates whether the project fits the series' programme — its focus on dialogicity across the full range of language use — and the publisher then subjects the proposal and, later, the completed manuscript to peer review, as is standard for scholarly books. This means the route to publishing in the series is curatorial: the most successful proposals are those that identify a genuine gap — a domain of dialogue research not yet covered, a new interdisciplinary conversation, or the proceedings of a productive symposium — and assemble the right contributors to fill it.

For individual scholars, the practical implication is that one does not "submit an article to Dialogue Studies". Instead, one contributes a chapter to a planned volume (usually by invitation from the volume's editors, often following a conference or workshop), proposes an edited collection to the series editor, or writes a monograph that fits the series' scope. Authors considering a proposal should study several recent volumes to understand the expected scholarly level, the typical length (edited collections in the series commonly run 250–350 pages), and the balance the series strikes between theoretical framing and empirical analysis.

A Companion Journal: Language and Dialogue

Readers who come to Dialogue Studies looking for a journal on dialogue are usually thinking of its companion periodical, Language and Dialogue, also published by John Benjamins. That journal (ISSN 2210-4119 print, 2210-4127 electronic; DOI prefix 10.1075/ld) is the periodical counterpart to the book series' programme: it publishes peer-reviewed articles on language as dialogue, including theoretical work by scholars such as Edda Weigand on dialogue as "the complex whole" of human action. The two publications are complementary — the journal for articles, the book series for extended thematic treatments — and authors in the field will often encounter both. Anyone evaluating a CV or a publication list should keep the distinction clear: a "Dialogue Studies" entry with a DS volume number is a book or book chapter; a "Language and Dialogue" entry with volume, issue and page numbers is a journal article.

Metrics, Indexing and Citation

Because Dialogue Studies is a book series, journal metrics do not apply to it: it has no Journal Impact Factor, no CiteScore, no SJR and no quartile ranking. Any third-party site displaying such metrics for "Dialogue Studies" is either misattributing data from another title or aggregating book citations in a non-standard way; treat such figures as unreliable. What can be said about the series' standing is qualitative: it is published by a leading linguistics publisher, edited by a recognised scholar in the field, and its volumes are held by research libraries worldwide and cited in the dialogue-research literature.

For citation purposes, books in the series should be cited as books, with the series name and volume number included: e.g., Dialogic Ethics, edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren, Dialogue Studies 30 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018). Individual chapters carry their own DOIs through the publisher's platform and should be cited with those DOIs. Libraries catalogue the series under its ISSN 1875-1792, which distinguishes it in union catalogues from similarly named journals and series.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dialogue Studies a journal? No. It is a peer-reviewed scholarly book series (ISSN 1875-1792, abbreviated DS) published by John Benjamins and edited by Edda Weigand. If you are looking for the journal, see Language and Dialogue (ISSN 2210-4119 / 2210-4127), the publisher's companion periodical.

What does the series publish? Scholarly books — mainly edited collections, occasionally monographs — on dialogue in the broad sense: everyday conversation, institutional interaction, mediated communication and literary dialogue, studied from linguistic, philosophical, sociological, anthropological and communication-studies perspectives.

Who is the series editor? Edda Weigand. Proposals for new volumes go to the series editor via John Benjamins.

How do I publish in the series? Contribute a chapter to a planned edited volume (usually by invitation), or propose an edited collection or monograph to the series editor with a full prospectus. There is no article-submission system and no APC; books go through the publisher's proposal and manuscript peer review.

How many volumes are there? The series reached volume 30 in 2018 and continues as an active series; check the publisher's catalogue for the current list.

Where can I buy or access the books? Through John Benjamins (print hardback and e-book), academic booksellers, and research libraries; chapter-level DOIs are available on the publisher's e-platform.

Does it have an impact factor? No — book series do not receive Journal Impact Factors or SJR rankings. Cite the books as books.

How should I cite a volume? As a book, including the series name and number: e.g., Dialogue across Media, ed. Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas, Dialogue Studies 28 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017). Cite chapters with their DOIs.

What is the series' central idea? Dialogicity: language understood as fundamentally directed toward an interlocutor, studied across the whole range of language use — everyday, institutional and literary.

The Field Behind the Series: Why Dialogue Studies Exists

The series' title names a field as well as a book list, and understanding the field explains the publishing programme. "Dialogue studies" designates the interdisciplinary study of interaction — how people actually talk, write, argue, negotiate, console, instruct and perform for one another, and how those practices are structured. Its roots run through several traditions: the philosophy of dialogue (from Buber's I and Thou through contemporary dialogic ethics); the linguistics of conversation (conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics); the sociology and anthropology of talk in institutions; rhetoric and argumentation theory; and literary and media studies of represented dialogue. What unites these traditions is a shift of attention from language as an abstract system to language as action between people — situated, sequential, and consequential.

This convergence created a practical problem that the book series was designed to solve: scholars of dialogue were publishing in the journals and book series of their home disciplines, with no single venue that treated dialogue as such as the object of inquiry. A linguist studying doctor–patient interviews, a philosopher theorising dialogic ethics, and a media scholar analysing televised debates had little reason to encounter one another's work. By taking "dialogicity" as its organising concept and ranging across everyday, institutional and literary language use, the Dialogue Studies series provides that shared venue in book form — extended, thematically coherent treatments that a journal article cannot accommodate. The series thus functions as infrastructure for the field: it makes the field visible to itself.

The choice of editor reflects this ambition. Edda Weigand, the series' founding and continuing editor, is a linguist whose own theoretical work proposes a unified, action-theoretic account of dialogue — treating dialogue as "the complex whole" of human communicative action, integrating grammar, action and interaction within a single framework. Whether or not one accepts that particular theory, it exemplifies the series' integrative aspiration: not merely to collect studies of dialogue, but to advance dialogue theory — principled accounts of what dialogue is and how it works across its many settings.

For Researchers and Librarians: Using the Series

For researchers, the most efficient way to use the series is through the publisher's catalogue and e-platform, where each volume has a dedicated page with its table of contents, chapter abstracts and DOI links. Because the volumes are thematic, a researcher can often find a ready-made literature review in the form of a volume introduction: the editors of each collection typically survey the state of research on their theme before presenting the new contributions. The chapter-level DOIs make it straightforward to cite individual studies without citing entire books, and the e-book editions support full-text searching across a volume.

For librarians, the series is acquired like other Benjamins series: as individual hardback or e-book titles, often through approval plans or e-book packages. The series ISSN (1875-1792) and the DS abbreviation support series-level catalogue records and standing orders. Because the volumes are interdisciplinary, they are relevant to collections in linguistics, communication, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, education and media studies — a single volume on, say, medical interviews may serve readers in applied linguistics, health communication and medical sociology alike. Librarians should note the distinction, in catalogue records and discovery layers, between this series and the similarly named journal Language and Dialogue: conflating the two produces incorrect holdings and citation data.

In short: Dialogue Studies (DS, ISSN 1875-1792) is John Benjamins' book series for the interdisciplinary study of dialogue, edited by Edda Weigand — not a journal, and not to be confused with the companion journal Language and Dialogue. It publishes edited collections and monographs that take dialogicity as their central concept across everyday, institutional and literary language use. Scholars engage with it by reading its thematic volumes, contributing chapters to planned collections, or proposing new volumes to the series editor; and everyone citing it should cite books and chapters — with series name, volume number and DOIs — rather than journal-style metrics that do not exist for book series.

Contributors and Scholarly Networks

The series' contributor lists read as a map of the international dialogue-research community. Volume editors and authors have included scholars working in Europe, North America and beyond — linguists, philosophers of communication, media researchers and discourse analysts — many of them connected through conferences and research networks devoted to dialogue analysis, pragmatics and interpersonal communication. This network character is typical of thematic book series: a volume often begins life as a panel or workshop where specialists discover they are working on complementary aspects of the same problem, and the book gives that emergent conversation a durable form.

For early-career researchers, this matters practically. Publishing a chapter in a Dialogue Studies volume places one's work alongside established scholars in the field and before an audience that has already self-selected for interest in dialogue — a more targeted readership than a general linguistics or communication journal can offer. For the field as a whole, the series' cumulative effect is a growing, systematically organised library of dialogue research: theory volumes, domain volumes (medicine, law, politics, media, literature), and language-specific studies that together document how the study of dialogue has matured from a scattered set of disciplinary interests into a recognised interdisciplinary enterprise.

A note on identification: the series ISSN 1875-1792 and abbreviation DS uniquely identify Dialogue Studies in library catalogues. When searching databases, include the publisher (John Benjamins) to avoid confusion with similarly named journals, conferences or book series in other fields.

For course use: instructors teaching pragmatics, discourse analysis, interpersonal communication or the philosophy of language can assign individual chapters — many volumes' introductions double as state-of-the-art surveys — while the series as a whole offers a ready-made reading list for graduate seminars on dialogue theory, since its volumes collectively map the field's major positions and debates.