Schutzian Research

About Schutzian Research

Schutzian Research — the Alfred Schutz yearbook in profile

Schutzian Research is an annual journal — its publisher, Zeta Books, subtitles it A Yearbook of Lifeworldly Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Science — devoted to the tradition of Alfred Schutz, the Austrian-American philosopher and social theorist whose phenomenology of the social world became one of the foundations of qualitative sociology. It is catalogued with ISSN 2067-0621 for the paperback edition and ISSN 2248-1907 for the electronic edition. The publisher's own aims statement is precise about the journal's openness within its tradition: it “seeks to continue the tradition of Alfred Schutz”, welcomes contributions that are “philosophical, cultural-scientific, or multidisciplinary in character”, and invites “a broad spectrum of qualitative and interpretive work, comparable with Schutz's orientation but not necessarily derived from it”. The journal is multilingual, with abstracts in English, and every submission is, in the publisher's words, “blindly reviewed by at least two experts in the appropriate field”. Its volumes run from volume 4 in 2012 and volume 5 in 2013 through volume 14 in 2022 to volume 17 in 2025 — a sequence that places the first volume in 2009 and documents an unbroken annual run.

Schutz himself needs a sentence of introduction for readers outside this tradition, because the journal cannot be understood without him. Alfred Schutz (1899–1959), an Austrian émigré who worked in New York, took Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and turned it toward the everyday social world — the lifeworld — analysing how ordinary actors understand one another, how stocks of taken-for-granted knowledge are built and shared, how people move between multiple realities such as everyday life, dreams, theatre and scientific theorising, and how a stranger, a homecomer or a well-informed citizen each inhabits a social world differently. Posthumous works and the Schutzian tradition he founded stand behind whole schools of qualitative inquiry — phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology's early context, interpretive social science — and Schutzian Research is the tradition's own yearbook: the venue its scholars built for themselves.

Quick facts

A note on the Journals World record: its structured publisher field stores a garbled numeric value, “8415”, in place of a publisher name, while its publisher taxonomy correctly names Zeta Books. The number is a database artefact and should not be cited. A second attribution point matters for this title specifically: OpenAlex, resolving the journal by ISSN, names the Philosophy Documentation Center in its host field. Zeta Books' own page explains that relationship — the Philosophy Documentation Center is the route for online access to individual articles, while Zeta Books is the publisher, issuing the volumes in paperback and electronic editions with their own ISBNs. This profile accordingly names Zeta Books as publisher and the Philosophy Documentation Center as an access provider, and reports the OpenAlex host field as a source conflict to be aware of, not as the publisher.

The tradition the journal serves

Schutzian scholarship is a recognisable intellectual world with its own classics, questions and institutions, and the journal's contents across its volumes map that world faithfully. The theoretical core is the phenomenology of the lifeworld: Schutz's analyses of intersubjectivity — how a self experiences another self as a fellow person rather than an object — of the provinces of meaning that make up the multiple realities of social life, of relevance, typification and the stock of knowledge at hand, and of the methodology those analyses imply for the social sciences. Around that core sit the tradition's characteristic dialogues: with Husserl, from whom Schutz took phenomenology and whose transcendental framing he redirected toward the mundane social world; with Max Scheler, whose work on sympathy Schutz re-read and re-ordered; with William James, whose account of multiple realities Schutz developed into a systematic theory; and with the sociologists — figures such as George Psathas, a founder figure of phenomenological sociology — who turned Schutz's programme into empirical research practice.

The journal's pages show all of this in operation. Volume 17 (2025) opens with an introduction by co-editor Michael D. Barber; carries Hubert Knoblauch on Schutz's notion of social collectivity as a transcendent province of meaning, tested against video-graphic data on applause at religious mass events — a characteristic Schutzian move, in which a precise conceptual analysis is brought to bear on recorded everyday action; Sophie Loidolt asking whether the public realm is an absent topic in Schutz's phenomenology; a critical study of the James–Schutz theory of multiple realities and the problem of a reality within a reality; and a study of cinema as a conduit of organised everyday transcendence, reading film-going through Schutz's provinces of meaning even though Schutz himself wrote nothing explicit on cinema. Earlier volumes show the same range: volume 14 (2022) grew out of the fortieth anniversary of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, with reflections by Hisashi Nasu and Steven Crowell on George Psathas and on phenomenology's distinctive role in social-scientific method; volume 5 (2013) carried work in honour of Psathas, including phenomenological sociology treated as an intellectual movement and ethnomethodological explorations; volume 8 (2016) included a Schutzian and ethnomethodological account of competence in the tango dance halls of Buenos Aires; volume 4 (2012) carried phenomenological research of nursing and its method — evidence that the journal's qualitative-social-science half is as real as its philosophical half.

That double identity — philosophy and qualitative social science, in one annual — is the journal's defining feature and the thing a prospective contributor must grasp. A purely exegetical paper on a Schutz text and an empirical qualitative study conducted in a Schutzian spirit are both at home here, and the strongest volumes place them side by side, so that the exegesis disciplines the empirics and the empirics test the exegesis. The associate editorship reflects the same span and the tradition's genuinely global geography: at checking, the publisher lists associate editors at the universities of Konstanz, Rio Grande do Norte, Tokyo, Waseda, Perugia, Erlangen-Nuremberg and Stephen F. Austin State, with an editorial board running from Loyola and Paris to Cluj, St. Gallen, Trier, Yale, Berlin and Vanderbilt, and an honorary board member in Claudia Schutz Gahagan of New York — the Schutz family itself represented on the masthead of the journal that carries the name.

How the journal works: review, ethics, money and preservation

Unusually among journals of its size, Schutzian Research states its operating rules on its publisher's page in full, and this profile can therefore be specific where many profiles must be vague. Review: all submissions are blindly reviewed by at least two experts in the appropriate field. Ethics: Zeta Books follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the journal's page sets out a full publication ethics statement covering the duties of authors, editors and reviewers — originality, the prohibition of plagiarism and of simultaneous submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal, confidentiality in review, conflict-of-interest restraint for referees, and the publisher's commitment to respond to alleged or proven misconduct with measures up to erratum, clarification or, in the most serious case, retraction. Money: there are no author fees for regular publication. The journal is subscription-based, with a hybrid open-access option for authors who want it and institutional subscriptions in paperback or campus-wide online form; authors interested in the open-access route are directed to contact the publisher, and no open-access price is stated on the page in hand, so none is quoted here. Copyright and republication: after two years from publication, the accepted version of an article — the Word document, not the final publisher PDF — may be made publicly accessible, and republication elsewhere is possible only two years after first publication in the journal. Preservation: long-term archiving of the electronic edition is assured through Portico and the CLOCKSS archive.

Those rules add up to a recognisable publishing philosophy: a traditional subscription yearbook, run to modern ethics standards, with no author-facing charge, a delayed self-archiving right, and proper dark-archive preservation. Authors comparing venues should weigh the two-year rhythm honestly — this is not the journal for work that must be openly posted in its final form immediately — against the absence of fees and the permanence of the venue within its tradition. Funders' open-access mandates should be checked against the hybrid option with the publisher directly, since the terms of that option are arranged by enquiry rather than published as a price list.

Indexing and metrics — attributed

The publisher's page lists the journal's indexing and abstracting coverage as: Scopus; Central and Eastern European Academic Source; CNKI Scholar; Dimensions; EBSCO Discover; Google Scholar; MIAR; Microsoft Academic; PhilPapers; ProQuest Summon; Scilit; and WorldCat Local. That is the publisher's own coverage claim, and it is stated here as such. PhilPapers, at least, can be confirmed independently from the records consulted for this profile: the journal has a PhilPapers venue record, and individual articles from volume 17 (2025) appear there with abstracts — the cinema and multiple-realities studies among them.

The citation figures, as elsewhere in this series, differ by system and are reported with their sources. The Journals World record carries an h-index of 4 and a Q3 category label, with coverage recorded as 2019–2025 on that record. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its paperback ISSN, records the source (S4210172265) with 174 works, 366 citations, an h-index of 8 and an i10-index of 6, a two-year mean citedness of about 0.038, and topics led by phenomenology and existential philosophy and philosophy and phenomenology studies. The gap between the two h-indices is of the familiar kind — different corpora, different windows — and neither is a verdict. For a yearbook in a small, book-centred humanistic tradition, raw citation volume is in any case a weak instrument: Schutzian influence travels through concepts — lifeworld, typification, province of meaning, the stranger — absorbed so deeply into qualitative sociology that they are often used without citation to any journal at all. The better indicators of this journal's standing are its continuity (seventeen volumes), its board, which is effectively a directory of the living Schutzian world, its Scopus listing, and its preservation arrangements.

A DOAJ search by both ISSNs, carried out for this profile, returned no DOAJ record for the journal — consistent with its subscription-based model with a hybrid option — and no DOAJ-based open-access claim is made for it here. Acceptance rates and times from submission to decision are not published in the sources consulted and are not estimated; the annual rhythm itself is the most important timing fact an author needs, because a missed yearly cycle is measured in a year, not in weeks.

Publishing in Schutzian Research — practical guidance

Submissions go to the editorial address given on the publisher's journal page, with the publisher's guidelines for authors — linked from that page — as the authoritative formatting and submission instructions; this profile does not reproduce them, because the publisher maintains them and they govern. What the journal's published record and stated rules establish is enough to prepare a serious submission. The work must belong recognisably to the conversation the journal exists to continue: a philosophical, cultural-scientific or multidisciplinary contribution in Schutz's tradition, or qualitative and interpretive work comparable with his orientation, whether or not it derives from him directly. It will be read blind by at least two experts in the specific field — in a community this size, that means the referees will know the literature the paper cites and the literature it should have cited, and purely nominal invocations of the lifeworld will not pass. It may be written in any of the journal's working languages — the journal is multilingual — but it must carry an English abstract. And it must be original and not under consideration elsewhere: the ethics statement is explicit on both points, and on the expectation that all co-authors have approved the final version submitted.

Thematically, the strongest signals from recent volumes are these. Conceptual work on the core Schutzian apparatus — intersubjectivity, collectivity, the public realm, multiple realities, transcendence — is welcomed when it moves the analysis somewhere, as Knoblauch's collectivity paper moves it toward contemporary video-based sociology of religion. Applications of Schutzian analysis to a concrete domain — cinema, nursing, dance, the professions — are welcomed when the domain talks back to the theory. Historical and memorial work on the tradition itself — the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences anniversary volume is the model — has a place when it documents the tradition's development rather than merely celebrating it. And methodological work, on what phenomenological research in the social sciences is and how it should be done, sits at the journal's historical centre and remains welcome.

For readers rather than authors: individual articles are accessible online through the Philosophy Documentation Center, institutional subscriptions are arranged with Zeta Books in paperback or online form, and the volumes themselves are physical objects as well as electronic ones — the publisher lists paperback editions with their own ISBNs (volume 8, for example, carries paperback ISBN 978-606-697-045-7 alongside its electronic counterpart). Libraries building a phenomenology collection should acquire the yearbook as a standing order rather than article by article: its value is cumulative, as the record of a tradition's year-by-year self-examination.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Schutzian Research?
ISSN 2067-0621 for the paperback edition and ISSN 2248-1907 for the electronic edition, per the publisher and the OpenAlex source record, which lists the same pair.

Who publishes it?
Zeta Books of Romania. The numeric value “8415” in the old Journals World publisher field is a data artefact. The Philosophy Documentation Center, named in OpenAlex's host field, is the provider of online access to individual articles, per the publisher's own page.

How often does it appear?
Annually — it is a yearbook. Volume 17 is dated 2025; the volume sequence in hand runs from volume 4 (2012) onward without a break.

Who edits it?
At checking, the publisher lists Michael Barber (Saint Louis University) and Daniela Griselda López (CONICET, University of Buenos Aires) as editors-in-chief, with an international group of associate editors and an editorial board spanning Europe, the Americas and Japan.

Is it peer-reviewed, and does it charge?
Yes — blind review by at least two experts, per the publisher — and no author fees are charged for regular publication. It is subscription-based with a hybrid open-access option arranged with the publisher.

What are its metrics?
H-index 4 on the Journals World record; OpenAlex source S4210172265 counts 174 works, 366 citations, h-index 8 and i10-index 6. The publisher lists Scopus among the journal's indexing services.

Can I post my published article?
Under the publisher's stated terms, the accepted version (not the final PDF) may be made publicly accessible two years after publication, and republication is possible only after two years. Check the current terms on the publisher's page before relying on them.

Sources and verification

This profile rests on: the Journals World record as first fetched (title, slug, ISSNs, coverage and h-index as stored, with the numeric publisher-field artefact noted); Zeta Books' journal page for Schutzian Research (subtitle, ISSN pair and edition assignment, aims and scope, editors-in-chief, associate editors, board, blind-review statement, multilingual character, COPE ethics statement, author fees, copyright and republication terms, archiving, the indexing list, and the Philosophy Documentation Center access route); Zeta Books' volume pages (volume 4, 2012; volume 5, 2013; volume 7, 2015; volume 8, 2016; volume 14, 2022 — including its Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences anniversary framing and article abstracts; volume 17, 2025); PhilPapers records for volume 17 articles (cinema; James and Schutz on multiple realities), confirming PhilPapers coverage independently of the publisher's list; and OpenAlex source S4210172265, resolved through the ISSN endpoint (ISSN pair, works, citations, h-index, i10, topics, homepage and host field — the last reported in the text as a conflict with the publisher of record, with the publisher's own explanation of the relationship). A DOAJ search by both ISSNs returned no record. Acceptance rates and review timelines beyond the stated review model were not found in the sources consulted.