Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first issue of Volume 22 of TESL-EJ.
Here we present another five well-reasoned, informative and stimulating articles on a variety of topics. Two of the articles are finally seeing the light of day after having languished for some time due to the crash of our previous submissions system. We must thank the authors for their patience!
I’d like to give special thanks to those on our team of co-editors who have been particularly involved in shepherding these articles through the publishing process: Timothy Caudery, Ram Giri, Brett Reynolds, Eli Hinkel and Jeffrey Brown, coordinated by our Managing Editor, Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni. One article of this set has made it from submission to publication in a scant five months. We hope that we can give such quick (but conscientious) processing to many more future submissions.
You might have noticed that this issue, as well as the February 2018 issue, have no media reviews. Both of our previous Media Editors, Thomas Delaney and Sarah Huffman have had to resign for personal reasons. We thank them for their many years of faithful service. We would like to welcome our new team of three co-editors, Erin Todey, Stacey Amling, and Behzad Mansouri, who are gearing up to publish their first reviews in the forthcoming August issue.
TESL-EJ often receives queries from scholars who are considering a submission, concerning the “impact factor” of TESL-EJ. We do not yet have an official “impact factor” since we are not yet indexed by the entities that calculate them, but in reality, with a journal such as TESL-EJ which features articles on a wide range of topics within the world of ELT, the impact factor would differ considerably depending on the specific sub-topic.
Furthermore, like many statistics, the “impact factor” is prone to misinterpretation and abuse. These days, a search engine such as Google Scholar can yield a fairly accurate report of how many times an article has been cited. Where the article was published is no longer a factor. More important is how many people deemed the article to be relevant to their own investigation. Promotion committees and those concerned about such numbers may well be doing their scholars an injustice by weighting them too heavily in their decision processes. See Larivière and Sugimoto (2018) for a full discussion of this issue.
Whatever your take on this matter, we hope that you will still enjoy this issue of TESL-EJ!
Best,
Thomas Robb, Editor, for the TESL-EJ Team
Reference
Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). The Journal Impact Factor: A brief history, critique, and discussion of adverse effects. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.08992. Retrieved from: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1801/1801.08992.pdf