Welcome to the first issue of 2019!
As we enter our 45th year of publication at JEMS, I open with the great news that for the latest 2017 impact factor ratings, we were ranked the number 1 journal in the Ethnic Studies category (2-year impact factor 1.871). This is all the more pleasing as we are the largest journal in the migration field, one with the quickest turnaround, and the time span covers one of expansion up to a massive 16 issues per annum – all factors that would militate against a high impact factor. Of course, it is important to state that aggregated metrics are an imperfect measure of ‘quality’ and impact factor indicators for journals are designed and suited for ‘hard science’ academic communities in the first instance, rather than ‘softer’ social science ones. As academics we sometimes seem to live under a tyranny of metrics – impact, output, etc. these days. None the less, if articles in JEMS are being well cited within a 2-year time frame compared to other similar journals, this is pleasing news. We will take that at face value. Our editorial policy is not driven by citation metrics. We’ve always been clear in the editorial team that JEMS is an interdisciplinary journal and that ‘quality’ with regard to publication should be with evaluated with regard to the specific original contribution of an article on its own terms within its own field. Some articles in niche fields will legitimately not have a broad academic audience appeal and resonance, but we still want them in JEMS, if our reviewers recognise that they contribute to understanding and advance knowledge. So, it is pleasing in a way if our approach to assessing ‘quality’ is in some way backed up by the metrics, even if we have no intention of changing our editorial policy to be driven by them!
JEMS is intentionally a ‘broad church’ in disciplines and topics present, but we also want JEMS to be a journal with global coverage. We want to see more visibility of regions of the world beyond ‘the West’ and more presence of scholars from those regions. Historically, the journal had a European focus, or even further way back a British race relations orientation. In recent years we have received more original article submissions (among the staggering 900 per annum!) from North America than Europe. This indicates an awakening of the journal as a forum for interaction and debates between European and US/Canadian scholars. We also have increasing contributions from SE Asia and Australia. This is good news. Such debates and interactions can reduce the ethno-centricism of dominant perspectives, open dialogues, inform and build research links, plus a lot of the action in migration is happening outside ‘the West’ including those aspects that are felt in ‘the West’. However, there is still some way to go in opening up to South American, African, and Asian scholars and their views on their societies.
Last week I came back from my first visit to mainland China, Guangzhou. Estimates put the numbers of internal migrants in China at between 200 and 300 million (while the number of international migrants in the world is roughly 250 million). Although JEMS is starting to include discussions of these important movements and their consequences in China and beyond, we are keen to promote more. It is important to militate against the way that European societies tend to view migration as movements from South to North (often in the narrow sense of crossing the Mediterranean) and the US and its political leaders are equally one-eyed in viewing flows from Mexico and ‘caravans’ from South America. My invitation from South China Normal University & Guangzhou University to be a keynote was related to an accepted JEMS Special Issue proposal entitled ‘China in an Era of Mobilities: New Theoretical Dialogues on Migration’. One criterion for our approach to accepting Special Issue proposals is that we try and be more inclusive of research by academics from underrepresented regions of the world, as well as topics and disciplines that maybe important, innovative and future-looking, but perhaps less present in mainstream migration discussions. Special Issues are an increasingly important part of our JEMS portfolio. In 2018, we published nine. While original article submissions simply to have to cross a quality threshold within their own field to be accepted, Special Issues can be a way for us to broaden the discussion regionally and topically. From now on we will hold one call for Special Issue proposals per annum.
This year we kick-off JEMS in 2019 with Nancy Foner’s (2019) ‘The uses and abuses of history: understanding contemporary U.S. immigration’. In this article, Nancy draws on her deep knowledge and experience in the field to elaborate on the importance of ‘history’ in shaping understandings of migration in the US. In a low attention span tweet-driven world, her article invites reflection on how and why history matters. Nancy’s article draws from her keynote lecture at the 5th SCMR-JEMS Annual Conference ‘Migration Matters: Global Challenges’ held at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research on 29th November 2017. At the Conference, we were also delighted to host talks by Nando Sigona (Birmingham), Naika Foroutan (Humboldt, Berlin), Michaela Benson (Goldsmiths, London) and Karen O’Reilly (Loughborough), Eric Fong (CUHK, Hong Kong), and Ronald Skeldon (Sussex/Maastricht). Our aim in establishing the SCMR-JEMS conference is to hold an annual event that celebrates the range, diversity and regional coverage across the globe of migration scholarship that is presented in the journal.
Readers, contributors and reviewers who are part of the JEMS migration community will be aware that our output of sixteen issues is massive and at the same time our inflow of submissions shows no signs of abating. To manage this ever-rising increase in the submission of high-quality migration scholarship while maintaining high reviewing standards we have expanded the Editorial team. In 2018, I was delighted that Rahsaan Maxwell (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Aleksandra Lewicki (Sussex) joined our core decision-making team. They add their skill-sets, expertise and regional knowledge to that of Sarah Scuzzarello (Sussex), Laura Morosanu (Sussex) and James Hampshire (Sussex). There are now six of us in the inhouse editorial team. This seems a long way from when I became Editor five years ago and was sat in Brighton Library with two large plastic carrier bags full of hard copy submissions doing the work on my own, before James joined me later in the year. I’d like to.
The other side of our exponential growth is that it means we make more requests on you, our community, to review. I remain astounded by the commitment and degree of effort and detail that many of you put into your reviews. I often learn a great deal from reading the reviews. A formal ‘Thank You’ to our reviewers for this latest period is published in this volume. To this, I would like to add my personal gratitude and respect for this essential work at a time when the academic careers are increasingly time-pressured.
We increasingly try to communicate about JEMS matters through Facebook (www.facebook.com/scmrjems) and Twitter (@scmrjems), both about research published and matters relevant events to our community. As I go to print, our 2018 SCMR-JEMS Conference ‘Global Migration and Mobilities: facing the challenges of exclusion’ is imminent, where David S. FitzGerald (UC San Diego) will be our keynote, with critique provided by Renee Luthra (Essex). Further speakers are Nicola Piper (Sydney), Sirijit Sunanta (Mahidol, Thailand), Ilse Van Liempt (Utrecht), and Adrian Favell (Leeds). We make this open and free in the hope that as many of you as possible might be able to attend.
Before closing I would like to extend my thanks our colleagues from the publisher Taylor and Francis, Zoe Sternberg, Matthew Derbyshire, Tracy Roberts, Claire Summerfield, Erato Basea and Ishtiaque Shams, who in my time as Editor have been very supportive and have prioritised academic needs over other concerns.
Wishing you a productive and pleasurable 2019,
Yours faithfully,
Paul Statham, Editor-in-Chief