journals

Journals about evaluation or research methods  

African Evaluation Journal   http://www.aejonline.org/index.php/aej/index   "The African Evaluation Journal will publish high quality peer-reviewed articles of merit on any subject related to evaluation, and provide targeted information of professional interest to members of AfrEA and its national associations and evaluators across the globe." 

Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation  https://www.utpjournals.press/loi/cjpe  From the Canadian Evaluation Society. From the Journal "The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation seeks to promote the theory and practice of program evaluation. To this end CJPE publishes full-length articles on all aspects of the theory and practice of evaluation and shorter Evaluation Practice Notes which share practical knowledge, experiences and lessons learned. A third section of the journal, Addressing Challenges in Evaluation Practice, presents real-life cases written by evaluation practitioners."

Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods   https://academic-publishing.org/index.php/ejbrm     "provides perspectives on topics relevant to research in the field of business and management."

Evidence Based Nursing  http://ebn.bmj.com   has a bunch of papers about "research made simple". You can go to their site and search. Some examples include "What is a case study" http://ebn.bmj.com/content/21/1/7 and "Ethnography: challenges and opportunities", http://ebn.bmj.com/content/20/4/98  

Forum: Qualitative Social Research  https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs  FQS is a peer-reviewed multilingual online journal for qualitative research. 

Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics  https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-analytics  Provides a forum for the study of measuring, evaluating, and improving the efficiency, reliability, and transparency of research and innovation in all areas of scientific inquiry and applications.

International Journal of Qualitative Methods   http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ijq    "The International Journal of Qualitative Methods is the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary open access journal of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) at the University of Alberta, Canada."

International Journal of Social Research Methodology   http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tsrm20/current   A -few- of the articles are available to read free online, like: Are there differences in responses to social identity questions in face-to-face versus telephone interviews? Results of an experiment on a longitudinal survey. May 2016.

Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences (JMM)   https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jmmss/   "is an online scholarly publication focusing on methodology and research design, measurement, and data analysis"

The Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods   https://jmasm.com/index.php/jmasm    "an independent, peer-reviewed, open access journal designed to provide an outlet for the scholarly works of applied nonparametric or parametric statisticians, data analysts, researchers, classical or modern psychometricians, quantitative or qualitative evaluators, and methodologists."

Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation   http://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/index    articles describing evalaution projects, and evaluation issues, methods, etc.

Journal of Official Statistics  https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jof   many articles about research methods. 

Methodology. European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences  https://meth.psychopen.eu/index.php/meth/  Methodology is the official organ of the European Association of Methodology (EAM), a union of methodologists working in different areas of the social and behavioral sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics, educational and political sciences).

Methods, data, analyses   http://mda.gesis.org/index.php/mda       "publishes research on all questions important to quantitative methods, with a special emphasis on survey methodology."

Pakistan Journal of Statistics   http://www.pakjs.com/   To get to the journals, click on PJS Library. One issue, Vol. 27, October 2011, No. 4, has a bunch of articles about surveys and sampling. Previous issues have various articles of interest.

Qualitative Social Research      http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/index    "A peer-reviewed, free and interdisciplinary online journal for qualitative research."  a journal of research about qualitative methods.  Some of the forums include: "Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Qualitative Research II", and "Text, Archive, Re-Analysis", and others.

 Qualitative Sociology Review   http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/index_eng.php   Research using qualitative methods, and some about qualitative methods. For example: "Oh yes, I remember it well!" Reflections on Using the Life-Grid in Qualitative Interviews with Couples .

The qualitative report   http://tqr.nova.edu/   edited on line journal about qualitative research.  A number of articles about qualitative methods.  

Social Research Update    http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/    lots of articles about many different techniques. published quarterly by the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, England. "Each issue, we will cover one topic in sufficient depth to indicate the main directions of recent developments and provide a bibliography for further reading. If there is room, we shall also list courses, addresses and other useful information." As of Sept 2024, last issue appears to be Spring 2019.

Surveillance and Society  http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index   has a couple of interesting issues. Vol 13, no 1, 2015, is Doing Surveillance Studies.

Survey Methods: Insights from the Field.   http://surveyinsights.org/   "The journal will be orientated towards the daily work of surveying". The journal is edited jointly by the Swiss Foundation for Research in the Social Sciences and GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

Survey Methodology  https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-001-x/index-eng.htm   From StatCan. "To draw on the expertise of internationally recognized professionals, look no further than Survey Methodology — a publication containing the very latest information on the development and application of survey techniques. Published twice yearly, Survey Methodology focuses on the development and evaluation of techniques used in data collection and interpretation."

   Also see their Statistics Canada International Symposium Series - Proceedings  https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/11-522-X   has various papers, such as "Center Sampling: A strategy for surveying difficult to reach populations", and "Data collection, sometimes all it takes is a little persuasion ... in the form of information". The last symposium proceeding is from 2016.

Survey Practice  https://www.surveypractice.org    A journal from American Association of Public Opinion Researchers. This journal is "designed to provide current information on issues in survey research and public opinion. The articles in Survey Practice emphasize useful and practical information designed to enhance survey quality by providing a forum to share advances in practical survey methods, current information on conditions affecting survey research, and interesting features about surveys and people who work in survey research."

Survey Research Methods   http://www.surveymethods.org/   actually forwards to   https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/   on line peer reviewed journal.  This journal "is the official journal of The European Survey Research Association"   http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/home/   

Survey Statistician   http://isi-iass.org/home/services/the-survey-statistician/   this is a newsletter from the International Association of Survey Statisticians. But some of the items are about survey methods.

Project Euclid   http://projecteuclid.org/   has a whole bunch of free on line statistical journals. Some of their journals are:

Electronic Journal of Statistics  https://projecteuclid.org/journals/electronic-journal-of-statistics  

Probability surveys  https://projecteuclid.org/journals/probability-surveys   sponsored by mathematical associations.

Statistics surveys  https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistics-surveys    "publishes survey articles in theoretical, computational, and applied statistics. The style of articles may range from reviews of recent research to graduate textbook exposition."  From several statistical associations. 

These two journals are sponsored by a couple of organizations, including the International Statistical Institute, which lists the journals here   https://www.isi-web.org/index.php/publications   Other journals include  Electronic Communications in Probability, Electronic Journal of Probability, Electronic Journal of Statistics, Probability Surveys, Statistics Surveys, Statistics Education Research Journal.

Finding free to read journals

Directory of Open Access Journals   http://www.doaj.org/   links to a bunch of  journals, and you can find statistics journals here

University of Toronto Press https://www.utpjournals.press/about/open-access  mostly medical or health journals, but also includes Canadian Journal of Evaluation, listed above.

Some region specific indexes include African Journals Online (AJO) https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol , SciELO https://scielo.org/en/  for Latin America, and Latindex https://www.latindex.org/latindex/  and Redalyc https://www.redalyc.org  both for journals that are published in Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal.

Not necessarily journals, but scholarly papers

CORE https://core.ac.uk  An open scholarly infrastructure for researchers by researchers. CORE (COnnecting REpositories) provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature, collecting and indexing research from repositories and journals. It is, to our knowledge, also the world’s largest collection of full text open access research papers. 

SSRN https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/  SSRN is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of preprints and research papers and is composed of a number of specialized research networks.

arxiv  https://arxiv.org   arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

Check out this very interesting SPOOF

Journal of Obnoxious Statistics    https://edithl.home.xs4all.nl/jobs.htm    The Journal of Obnoxious Statistics (JOBS) is created specially for Lars Lyberg by his friends and colleagues to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Journal of Official Statistics.

Conference proceedings

Papers from the US Census Bureau  Center for Statistical Research and Methodology  https://www.census.gov/srd/csrmreports/byyear.html 

Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology (FCSM)  https://www.fcsm.gov    is an interagency committee dedicated to improving the quality of Federal statistics. Has reports from conferences, and links to reports from other agencies.

Australasian Evaluation Society    http://www.aes.asn.au/    has some papers from their conferences available.  https://www.aes.asn.au/annual-conference-papers   Not necessarily research, for example, these from 2016: Griffin, Mark - Introduction to Scale Development. and Griffin, Mark - Introduction to Data Management and Information Systems for Evaluation Practitioners. Another one, more sort of research, is: Roberts, David - It ain't necessarily so: The implications of cognitive science for evaluation methodsIr

 American Statistical Association, Survey Research Methods Section has proceedings  http://www.asasrms.org 

Joint Statistical Meetings https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/Proceedings/index.cfm 

Predatory journals

While there -are- a lot of free to read journals online, there are, unfortunately, many predatory journals. These are journals which publish articles, but which don’t have any peer review or editing. The journals just collect fees from authors and publish anything. A number of publishers and scholarly organizations joined together and have this website:  Think. Check. Submit. https://thinkchecksubmit.org/  which has a checklist of characteristics that legitimate journals should have. This website also lists a number of “recognized industry initiatives” including indexes for specific regions of the world, such as AJO, SciELO and the others listed above. 

The World Association of Medical Editors has another page on how to identify predatory journals https://wame.org/identifying-predatory-or-pseudo-journals. 

A search in pubmed turns up a 2024 article in American Journal of Medicine, Predatory Journals: What the Researchers and Authors Should Know, a very brief review https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(24)00100-1/fulltext .  

Another report is this: Predatory and Questionable Publishing Practices : How to Recognise and Avoid Them. https://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/wurpubs/629053  published by the Wageningen University & Research staff.

Wikipedia also has information about other proposals to identify predatory journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing .   

Look at Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association   https://oaspa.org  and see what publishers are members: https://www.oaspa.org/membership/current-members/  

Biomed Central has this article  https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-017-0785-9  March 2017

In general, it’s good practice to know a bit about predatory journals, and to review any journals you read, just to make sure. 

last verified 9/4/2024. Last updated, 9/18/2024.