About International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice

International Journal of Social Research Methodology

The International Journal of Social Research Methodology is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Taylor & Francis, through its Routledge journals programme, in the United Kingdom. It is devoted not to the findings of one substantive field, but to the methods by which social research itself is designed, carried out, analysed, taught and judged. Its print ISSN is 1364-5579 and its online ISSN is 1464-5300, the pair recorded on the JournalsWorld record for this title and confirmed in Taylor & Francis article records, university repository records for articles published in the journal, and bibliographic listings for the title. Articles carry DOIs in the 10.1080/13645579 sequence, formed from the print ISSN, which is a useful check when a reader needs to confirm that a citation really belongs to this journal and not to a similarly named methods title.

The journal was established in 1998 and has been published continuously since that year. Publication coverage from 1998 onward is also the coverage shown on the related JournalsWorld record for the fuller title form, International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice. That subtitle describes the journal well. It publishes work on the theory of social inquiry as well as the practice of doing research: how questions are framed, how cases and respondents are selected, how interviews, surveys, observations and digital traces are turned into evidence, how analysis proceeds, and how ethical and political questions run through every one of those choices. For readers who study methodology as a subject in its own right, and for researchers in sociology, education, health research, social policy, geography, political science and neighbouring fields who need a defensible account of a method, this is one of the established international venues.

Quick facts

What the journal is for

Most journals ask what a study found. This journal also asks, and often asks first, how the study was put together, why those choices were reasonable, what those choices made visible, and what they hid. That focus matters because social research methods are not neutral tools that can be picked up unchanged in any setting. A survey question that works in one language, age group or institutional setting may fail in another. An interview that produces frank talk in one setting may produce guarded talk where the researcher is seen as an official. A sampling strategy that is practical for a visible population may systematically miss a hidden one. By publishing papers that work through those problems in detail, the journal gives later researchers something they can cite, adapt and argue with, instead of a brief methods paragraph that reports decisions without explaining them.

The National Centre for Research Methods in the United Kingdom, in a call for the journal's College of Reviewers, described it as established as a leading UK journal in its field, publishing articles across the methodological spectrum, both quantitative and qualitative, and initiating and hosting methodological debates in the journal and at live events. That description, from a national methods centre rather than from the publisher's own marketing, captures the journal's reputation among methods teachers and researchers. The same call noted the journal's commitment to supporting social researchers and methodologists who have recently entered the profession, and listed areas where reviewer expertise was especially sought, including mobile methods and experimental methods, qualitative data analysis including computer aided analysis, and philosophies of social research. Those three areas still give a fair map of the journal's breadth, from the newest data collection techniques to the oldest questions about what social knowledge is.

Scope in detail

Qualitative research methods

Qualitative work is a major strand. Papers address interviewing in its many forms, ethnography and field relations, focus groups, narrative and life history work, discourse and textual analysis, visual methods, diary and solicited methods, and the practical and emotional labour of fieldwork. A well known example of the journal's attention to the researcher as a person in the field is the article on working with emotion in fieldwork and teamwork, published in volume 4 in 2001, which argued that the emotions of researchers, not only those of respondents, need to be acknowledged if accounts of the social world are not to be impoverished. Papers of this kind are useful long after publication because they name problems that methods textbooks often pass over: rapport that fails, disclosures that arrive at the end of an interview, loyalty conflicts inside a research team, and the difference between what a protocol says and what a field situation allows.

Quantitative and survey methods

A second strand covers survey design, sampling, nonresponse, measurement, questionnaire testing, statistical modelling and the use of administrative and linked data. The JournalsWorld topic record for the journal highlights survey methodology and nonresponse among its recurring themes, and that matches the journal's contents over many volumes. Papers in this strand tend to be valued when they do more than report a dataset: when they test a question wording, compare modes of data collection, show how a weighting choice changes a conclusion, or explain why a measure that looks simple, such as a single item on health, gender belief or trust, carries assumptions that users should state. A repository record for a recent article in the journal, developing a drawing based quantitative measure of children's gender ability beliefs and assessing its reliability and validity, illustrates the pattern: a concrete measurement problem, evidence about how the measure behaves, and discussion of how others could use it with care.

Mixed methods and the logic of combining approaches

The journal has been an important home for mixed methods writing in the social sciences. One of its most cited articles, on becoming a pragmatic researcher and the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, set out a position that many later studies cite when they explain why a design uses more than one kind of evidence. Good mixed methods papers in this journal are expected to do more than place a survey next to some interviews. They need to show where the strands meet, which strand answers which part of the question, how contradictions between strands are handled, and what the design can claim that a single strand design could not. Readers preparing a funding proposal or a doctoral design often use the journal for exactly that reasoning.

Sampling, cases and generalisation

Sampling in qualitative and small scale research receives sustained attention. The article on the hermeneutics of snowball sampling in qualitative research, one of the journal's most cited papers in citation listings for the title, treats snowball sampling not as a shortcut but as a process with its own social dynamics, gatekeepers and biases that need to be reported. Similar care is applied to case selection, purposive sampling, saturation claims, and the language researchers use when they move from a studied case to a wider claim. For examiners, reviewers and journal editors in other fields, papers from this journal are frequently the reference they point to when a methods section needs a stronger justification.

Scoping, reviewing and synthesising evidence

The single most cited article associated with the journal in citation listings is the 2005 paper proposing a methodological framework for scoping studies. That paper helped turn the scoping review from an occasional label into a described approach, with stages that later authors could follow, adapt and cite. Its presence in the journal is a good example of the title's wider role: it publishes the papers that define how a method should be done, and those papers are then used across health, education, social policy and many other areas far beyond the journal's home disciplines. Later contributions in the journal have continued to debate review methods, including how searches are reported, how inclusion decisions are made, and how qualitative and quantitative evidence can be brought together without pretending they are the same kind of material.

Philosophy, theory and ethics of social research

Methodology in this journal includes philosophy. Papers discuss realism, constructionism, pragmatism, feminist and decolonial critiques of method, the politics of categories, and the ethics of research with people who may be vulnerable, powerful, or simply tired of being researched. Ethical discussion here goes beyond consent forms. It includes the ethics of representation in writing, of archiving and reusing data, of researching online spaces where people did not expect a researcher, and of returning findings to communities. The journal's interest in the definition of the researcher, the researched and the audience makes it a regular citation source for doctoral training courses on research ethics.

Digital, mobile and new forms of data

As social life has moved partly online, the journal has published work on digital ethnography, social media data, mobile methods, geo located data, data linkage, and the methodological questions raised by large administrative and platform datasets. The reviewer call noted above already singled out mobile methods and experimental methods as areas of shortage more than a decade of publishing ago, and the need has only grown. Papers in this area are expected to address access, consent, representativeness and the stability of data that a platform can change or withdraw. A methods paper that only celebrates a new data source, without those cautions, is unlikely to fit the journal's critical style.

Teaching and learning research methods

The journal also publishes on how research methods are taught and learned. A special issue call circulated through the British Educational Research Association invited contributions on the teaching and learning of social research methods, covering the learning journeys of methods teachers, the pedagogical cultures around methods teaching, the role of textbooks and software, innovations in methods and their effect on teaching, and initiatives in quantitative methods teaching, with international contributions welcomed and with attention to what large and administrative data mean for the classroom. That call shows the journal treating methods education as a scholarly subject, not an afterthought, which is one reason its articles appear so often on training course reading lists.

Article types and what editors look for

The core of the journal is the full research article that makes a methodological contribution: a new approach, a tested improvement, a careful comparison, a worked example that changes how readers should do a task, or a critique that shows why a common practice misleads. The journal has also hosted debates, special issues and shorter contributions that respond to arguments in its pages. Whatever the format, the test is the same. A paper that only reports substantive findings, with a routine methods section, belongs in a substantive journal. A paper for this title needs the method itself to be the contribution, with enough detail that a competent reader could judge it, reuse it or dispute it.

Authors should therefore write the methods reasoning as the main text, not as a compressed appendix. State the research setting and why the method was needed there. Describe alternatives that were considered and why they were set aside. Report failures and adjustments, not only the final smooth procedure. Show evidence about quality: response patterns, coder agreement where that is relevant, sensitivity checks, reflexive notes, or comparisons with another source. Discuss transfer: where else the approach might work, and where it should not be used. Papers that hide those steps behind phrases such as standard procedures were followed tend to attract the obvious reviewer question, and the journal's own published articles give authors a clear model of the fuller style that is expected.

Peer review and submitting

Submissions are made through the Taylor & Francis submission system for the journal, and manuscripts are subject to peer review. The journal's College of Reviewers initiative, described by the National Centre for Research Methods, invited early career social scientists to review around three submitted papers a year, with a publisher voucher offered for each completed review. That scheme illustrates two things about the journal's review culture: it draws reviewers from practising methodologists across career stages, and it has actively recruited in shortage areas rather than relying on a narrow circle. Authors should expect reviewers who know the method literature well and who will test claims about novelty, so a careful positioning against earlier work in this journal and in the wider methods literature is essential.

Practical points that can be verified from the publisher and journal records are these: use the online ISSN and DOI pattern above to confirm you are on the correct journal page, follow the current author instructions on that page for length, anonymisation, data statements and declarations, and treat any fee information there as the current position. Article processing charges, open access options, word limits and board membership are operational details that publishers update; this profile does not state a figure for them because a current verified figure was not established from the sources consulted, and inventing one would mislead authors. That caution is itself good practice for any journal: confirm the charge and the licence before you sign a publishing agreement, and keep a copy of the terms you accepted.

Metrics and how to read them

Citation indicators for this journal are strong for a methods title, but the numbers a reader meets will differ by database and by year, and this profile reports them with their sources rather than as a single official figure. The JournalsWorld record lists an h index of 119. Research listings for the journal have reported a SCImago h index of 89 at the time they were compiled, and the related fuller title record on this site listed an h index of 95 in its indicators. Those differences are normal: h indexes grow over time and are counted over different document sets. What they agree on is the direction. This is a heavily cited journal whose best known papers are cited in the thousands, with the scoping studies framework paper listed at more than eight thousand citations in one citation listing, the snowball sampling paper at more than one thousand, and the pragmatic researcher paper at several hundred. Journal level rankings in secondary listings place the title in the top quartile for social sciences categories, and a listing based on Scopus data placed it eleventh of 275 in its category at compilation. Treat any single rank as a snapshot, check the year it refers to, and remember that for a methods journal the more telling test is whether its papers are the ones other researchers actually use to justify their designs.

Who should read and cite it

Doctoral researchers will find the journal useful at three moments: when choosing a design, when defending that design to supervisors and examiners, and when writing the methods chapter in a way that shows reasoning rather than ritual. Research teams use it when a project hits a practical problem, such as low response, difficult access, a sample that keeps changing shape, or data that arrive in a form the original plan did not expect. Methods teachers use it because many articles are written as clear, self contained treatments of one problem, suitable for a seminar. Editors and reviewers in substantive fields use it as a reference shelf when a submitted manuscript makes a methodological claim that needs checking. Policy and practice researchers, including those working in evaluation, benefit from its treatment of mixed methods and evidence synthesis, where the audience often needs to know not only what was found but how much weight the way of finding it can bear.

Similar titles and identity checks

Several titles sound close to this one, and careful checking matters. Sociological Methodology and Sociological Methods and Research are different journals, with different publishers and ISSNs. International Journal of Research and Method in Education is a different Taylor & Francis title with an education focus. This journal's subtitle, Theory and Practice, appears in some listings and in the related JournalsWorld record 8996, International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, which carries the same ISSN pair, 1364-5579 and 1464-5300, and the same 1998 starting year. That record and this one describe the same journal under a short title and a fuller title form, so they are a duplicate pair for the site's merge process; the bibliographic identity, one journal published by Taylor & Francis since 1998, is not in doubt. When citing, use the title form and ISSN from the article you actually read, and give the DOI, which removes any ambiguity.

Frequently asked questions

Is the International Journal of Social Research Methodology the same journal as the Theory and Practice title?

Yes, on the evidence of the shared ISSN pair, publisher and starting year, the fuller form is the same journal with its subtitle shown. Cite the form printed on the article and include the DOI.

Does the journal publish substantive findings?

It publishes substantive material when the methodological contribution is central and clearly drawn out. A findings paper with a routine methods section is better aimed at a journal in its substantive field.

Does it cover quantitative work, or only qualitative work?

Both, and work that combines them. The National Centre for Research Methods description states that it publishes across the methodological spectrum, both quantitative and qualitative, and its contents include survey, sampling, measurement and statistical topics alongside ethnography, interviewing and narrative work.

Is it open access?

It is a subscription journal in which individual articles may be open access. Check the article page and the publisher's current terms for the licence of a specific article, and check current author side charges on the journal page before submitting, as those terms change.

How can I verify a citation to this journal?

Check the ISSN pair, 1364-5579 and 1464-5300, check that the DOI begins with the Taylor & Francis prefix and contains the journal sequence 13645579, and check the volume year against the journal's run from 1998 onward.

Sources and verification note

This profile is based on the live JournalsWorld record for post 362575, Taylor & Francis article and repository records carrying the journal's ISSNs and DOI pattern, the National Centre for Research Methods call for the journal's College of Reviewers, the British Educational Research Association circulation of the journal's special issue call on teaching and learning research methods, and citation listings for the journal's best known articles. Where a current operational detail such as a fee, a timetable or a board list could not be verified from those sources, this profile says so rather than stating a figure. Metrics are reported with the source that produced them, because databases count differently.