@politicalscience Some qualitative researchers expressed their discontent and asked why bother submitting to CPS when one can expects to get desk rejected. It was also argued that the numbers are unlikely to reflect that qualitative submissions are unlikely to be so much worse than quantitative submissions.
This is a natural response, I think, but the problem is we know too little to infer much from it. 2/
We do not know who is submitting what to CPS. I also do not think that qualitative work is worse in general, but it could be that submissions to CPS are worse, on average. For example, ECR who are less experienced in writing articles may submit more to CPS, possibly because they do not know about the high desk-rejection rate. More senior researchers with publishing experience do not submit to CPS at the same rate, sending their 3/
@politicalscience more promising articles to other journals. I am not saying this is likely to be the case. My point is more generally that one should not jump to conclusions based on a handful of numbers.
2) We do not know how exactly desk-reject decisions are made. The criteria for CPS submissions do read reasonable for qualitative research. https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/CPS On the plus side, the CPS editors said that they once did an audit study of their qual desk rejections. 4/
@politicalscience Qualitative researchers evaluated the desk rejections and, according to the editors, would have made the same decisions. This still does not mean that qualitative research is bad or worse than quantitative work.
One issue could be that there is a lack of standards for determining what good qualitative research is. In case studies and process tracing, I guess there are as many recommendations of what good qual research is as there are textbooks.
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@politicalscience In quantitative research, there also disagreements (potential outcomes vs DAGs, for example). Overall, however, there is a more coherent framework and standards for assessing the quality of RDs, DiD etc.
A second issue could be that the standards of good qualitative research have been rising over the past 10 years (regardless of what standard you pick). Empirical research needs some time to catch up with rising standards.
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@politicalscience Editors have a lot of discretion when deciding about submissions. A large part of how the discretion is used remains invisible from the outside. I really like the idea of doing an internal audit of editorial decisions, desk rejections in particular. It would be interesting to do an audit for 2022 (I think the last one was some time ago) and to take other journals on board that report similar numbers for qualitative submissions 7/
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