Date: Sunday, January 5, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I’m Gene Shackman, Applied Sociologist and author of The Beginners Guide to Evaluation. I’ve been doing social science research all my academic and professional life, and I manage a website that links to free resources about social science research methods. I’ve found many free online resources to be very helpful so I wanted to share them. They can all be found on my website here, and I will describe them in further detail below.
To begin, here are some journals that are specifically about evaluation:
Some are not specifically about evaluation, but are about research methods in general:
A number of journals focus on specific methodologies. Qualitative methods are a popular topic, with journals including:
Another popular topic is survey method, including:
I found a lot of journals about statistics, including:
There are several collections of free to read online journals, not necessarily limited to evaluation or research methods. The best known is probably the Directory of Open Access Journals. I found several of the above listed journals through DOAJ. Project Euclid has a whole bunch of free online statistical journals, and also has a search function for online journals. Some region specific indexes include African Journals Online (AJO) https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol, and SciELO https://scielo.org/en/ for Latin America.
Finally, 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 the website Think. Check. Submit. 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 others. The World Association of Medical Editors has another page on how to identify predatory 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. Wikipedia also has information about other proposals to identify predatory journals.
In general, it’s good practice to know a bit about predatory journals, and to review any journals you read, just to make sure.
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