Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline (InformingSciJ)
Online ISSN: 1521-4672 • Print ISSN: 1547-9684
Message from the Editors-in-Chief
The journal is transdisciplinary. InformSciJ's transdisciplinary character enables us to provide you with a broad array of contributions from various disparate fields. These contributions elaborate on finding better ways to inform. Sadly, unlike successful commercial businesses, academia still prizes research only if it stays within artificial disciplinary boundaries imposed by faculty structures. Other organizations and businesses reject this view. Most academic research and development is funded by a few sources, with the federal government being the largest at 53% (or around $45 billion) in 2019. This journal was created to provide readers in one discipline with a novel perspective—even if that perspective is not necessarily novel in the author's discipline. In this way, the journal serves transdisciplinary knowledge creation.
The research topic must explicitly relate to informing. Potential authors can look at Cohen (2009) to better understand what we mean by informing. Additional insights can be found in Cohen (1999), Gill and Bhattacherjee (2007), Gill and Cohen (2009), and Tommasi (2023).
The journal encourages submissions on bias, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and such.
The most common submission types include the following:
Theory Building and Theory Test
Synthesis: An existing body of theory and observations are organized into a more cohesive whole. Literature reviews and metastudies may fall into this category if it attempts to propose a novel systematic organization for the existing literature.
Illustration: The meaning or implications of a particular theory are explained and clarified through an illustrative example. In the business literature, for example, nearly all practitioner-directed publications use this technique extensively.
Unexplained Observation: We welcome papers that point out what can't be explained by existing theories. Furthermore, we particularly welcome publishing well-constructed research papers on informing that fail to confirm current thinking and theories.
Early Promising Work: We will also consider publishing promising research findings in their later formative stages—during which the presented ideas are still somewhat malleable, even before all ideas have been fully tested. For example, a manuscript that proposes a well-developed and conceptualized theory need not include a rigorous empirical test of the same theory.
All published articles must be grammatically correct, understandable prose, concisely written in "journal English" that is understandable by those for whom English is a second language.
