About the Journal

 

Aims & Scope

ISSN 2978-4573 (Online)

Registered Reports in Linguistics is a journal that publishes Registered Reports of qualitative and quantitative exploratory and corroboratory research within the field of linguistics. By corroboratory (aka confirmatory) research we mean research that sets out to empirically assess specific research hypotheses in light of data, formulated within the context of existing knowledge in the field of linguistics and gaps therein.

Registered Reports are a new article format and publishing model that prioritises the meaningfullness of research questions and hypotheses, and the rigour of the methodology employed to address them. It involves peer-review before data collection, analysis and interpretation. High-quality studies are granted conditional acceptance of publication, provided the authors adhere to the approved methodology and explicitly flag any deviation as exploratory, non-corroboratory, work.

We strive to provide authors and reviewers with a welcoming and respectful space where we can constructively exchange ideas and thrive. Our editorial board is composed of people with a wide range of walks of life and we aim at achieving a better and better representation of the Global Majority and minoritised groups, their epistemology and languages. We will not tolerate any form of dismissal and harassment, direct or indirect, towards authors and reviewers. We periodically audit our Equality, Diversity and Inclusiveness achievements to ensure our values are matched by our practice.

Research soundness

We define research soundness as the combination of three desirable features:

  • Transparency: sound research is transparent, by which all research decisions are explicitly documented and justified. Transparency ensures researchers’ accountability.
  • Well-groundedness: well-grounded research is contextualised within the research topic by drawing from relevant knowledge and it formulates contextualised research questions and (if applicable) research hypotheses that are as precise as possible. Well-groundedness ensures precision of concepts and methods.
  • Reflexivity: sound research includes a reflexive practice, by which researchers reflect on their positionality, their philosophical stance and the degrees of freedom involved in their research practice. Research reflexivity ensures the relativity and subjectivity of research practices (whether it is epistemological, ontological or both) is taken into consideration and its impact on research outcomes are well-known by research practitioners.

Together, transparency, well-groundedness and reflexivity work together towards achieving three goals: reducing biases (from dangerous, aka questionable, research practices), increasing believability and underlining the contextuality of research outcomes. These goals affect the reliability and trustworthiness of analytical results:

  • Results are reliable when their validity is agreed upon by the research community. Validity applies either to single instances of analytical results (if applicable)—reproducibility—or to multiple instances of analytical results—replicability, robustness and generalisability (https://book.the-turing-way.org/reproducible-research/overview/overview-definitions). If applicable, analytical results from sound research are reproducible, by which independent researchers obtain the same results using the same data and analysis pipeline. Sound research enable independent researchers to assess when the analytical results are replicable (by which the same analytical pipeline applied on new data from within the same research context as the original study generates the same results), robust (by which a different analytical pipeline applied on the same data from the original study generates the same results) and generalisable (by which a different analytical pipeline applied on new data from within the same or different research contexts as the original study generates the same results).
  • Results are trustworthy when they are dependable on documented and justified research decisions or when common sense dictates that they are.

Finally, in sound research, claims based on analytical results must clarify in which times, spaces and researchers those claims apply to.

Impact

We believe all research has the potential for impact (on society and beyond) and don't think that the nature of the impact affects the soundness of the research (in the sense that greater impact implies greater soundness or vice versa). In light of this, we do not expect researchers submitting to RRLing to explicitly mention the impact of the research in their manuscript and we ask reviewers not to consider impact in their assessment of the research being submitted.

Registered Reports in Linguistics is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal. All content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, unless otherwise stated. There are no fees to access or publish in the journal.

Governance & Ownership

Registered Reports in Linguistics is owned and governed by the journal editors. Copyright to papers published within the journal issues are owned by their respective authors under Creative Commons licenses. The journal is published by the University of Edinburgh – a charitable body. Edinburgh Diamond – a service based within the University of Edinburgh Library – acts as the Publishing Partner by providing publishing services.

 

Indexing

Registered Reports in Linguistics is currently seeking new indexing arrangements.

 

Policies

Please see the Journal Policy page for information on preservation, copyright, licensing, open access, permissions, and privacy.

 

Publication Frequency

Registered Reports in Linguistics publishes one issue per year.