
portal: Libraries and the Academy, focuses on qualitative or quantitative research about the role of libraries and librarianship within the academy. Articles may address the scholarship of library and information science or examine the role of libraries in fulfilling the mission of their parent institution. Other papers deal with such topics as archival practice, copyright, data management, digital humanities, library as place, new approaches to research and teaching, open access, and organizational theory. Still others link librarianship to other disciplines, including law, management, and public history.
Both basic and applied research papers, including case studies, are welcome, as are essays that explore the more theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of the library profession. The journal welcomes the submission of inquiries and proposals for topics that authors have under development and will provide guidance on the suitability for publication in portal.
The editors and Editorial Board of portal consider it critical for the library profession to engage a global audience, and so the journal gladly receives submissions from other countries. To ensure clarity and readability, portal encourages international authors to seek a thorough review of any manuscript by a professional colleague who is fluent in English.
portal publishes only original, previously unpublished content. Authors should consult the journal editor if part, or all, of their submitted manuscript has been published previously. portal acknowledges that, during research and manuscript preparation, authors may benefit from discussing or presenting some of their findings at conferences or meetings, or from posting such content on e-mail lists or academic social networks. Authors must notify the editor and provide details of such dissemination when submitting their article. Authors must also notify the editor if their manuscript uses data from another published study, making the case for their study’s added value, originality, or both.
Authors should not submit the same manuscript for review to more than one journal at a time. Posting of manuscripts on personal sites, in institutional repositories, or, if required by law or policy, to an open access archive is permitted only afterthe article has been accepted and the copyright agreement with the Johns Hopkins University Press has been finalized.
Feature articles are edited but typically not peer-reviewed. They may be shorter than other articles and sometimes lack a research focus. Send proposals or questions about features and related communications to the appropriate feature editor, with copies to Ellysa Stern Cahoy, ellysa@psu.edu, and to Anne C. Behler, portalmanagingeditor@gmail.com,” The following features appear regularly in portal:
The editors and Editorial Board of portal have endorsed the principles and practices in the documents “A Statement of Ethics for Editors of Library and Information Science Journals” and “A Guide to Best Practices for Editors of Library and Information Science Journals,” both issued in 2009 and revised in 2010, and posted at www.lis-editors.org/ethics/index.html and www.lis-editors.org/best-practices/. We encourage authors, reviewers, and other editors and publishers to follow these standards for integrity and responsibility.
Through its editorial practices, portal supports the development and evolution of inclusive language, including the use of the singular they. The journal encourages authors to refer to themselves by their chosen pronouns and to honor that practice for individuals referenced in their articles.
Submissions to portal go through a double-blind review process: the reviewers of the paper do not know who the authors are, nor do the authors know the identity of the reviewers. The managing editor redacts any information or embedded metadata from the manuscript that could identify the authors and sends it to two referees, members of the portal Editorial Board.
The portal reviewers rate the submission using a standard assessment rubric. It asks them to evaluate the manuscript in several areas, including appropriateness to the journal’s readership, originality, literature review, research methodology, and clarity of writing. Some referees also provide authors with a marked-up manuscript with additional comments and suggestions. The assessment framework asks referees to indicate when a submission has merit but needs additional work before publication. If they determine that an author should revise and resubmit a manuscript, the editor will forward that recommendation to the author. Once the author has incorporated the suggestions of the referees, the revised manuscript will go back for review, usually to the original referees but occasionally to other members of the Editorial Board. Over time, we have seen this process produce outstanding results.
When the manuscript is accepted, with or without revisions, the editor will notify the author as soon as possible, suggesting a deadline for resubmission of the next iteration. Upon final acceptance, the editor will provide an estimated publication date and, if possible, indicate the journal volume and issue number. If, at the end of the peer-review process, the editor decides not to publish, she will inform the author with an explanation for that decision.
portal feels that while library learning analytics research holds potential, it is also rife with ethical issues. Learning analytics is defined as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (see SOLAR). Academic libraries are engaging in learning analytics research, and our editorial outlines our views. Authors should address relevant ethical issues if their work is a learning analytics study. Reviewers of learning analytics research will be instructed to look specifically for ethics discussions within a piece’s literature review and research design sections and also can address learning analytics ethics in additional sections.
Write in a clear, readable style. Use mostly short, declarative sentences, and vary the structure of your sentences. portal prefers that the active voice is used as much as possible.
Keep yourself out of your article. Many experts believe that the first person is inappropriate for scholarly writing. Refer to yourselves as “the authors,” “the researchers,” or “the investigators” instead of “we.” Keep your opinions out of your article, too. Present your information in an open-minded, objective manner. Avoid editorializing, value judgments, and loaded words and phrases.
Pay careful attention to grammar and spelling. Write in complete sentences, with a subject and a verb in each. Subjects and verbs must agree—that is, a plural subject requires a plural verb, and vice versa.
Editors and reviewers often judge misspellings, typos, and grammatical errors harshly; they can undermine a good first impression. Such flaws raise concern about the overall quality of the submission and the meticulousness of the author. Use your software’s spell check, but remember that it will not catch every error. Review your manuscript carefully.
Proofread the edited version carefully as well. Authors are responsible for reviewing any editorial changes, including copyediting, to ensure that errors have not been introduced inadvertently.
portal’s requirements for the preparation of manuscripts include:
The rules for references in portal include:
Include appropriate charts, graphs, tables, drawings, and photographs to support your text and summarize your findings. In portal nomenclature, a “table” consists of words and numbers displayed in columns, created entirely on a keyboard. Graphic material, such as pie charts, bar graphs, drawings, and photographs, are called “figures.” portal’s rules for tables and figures include:
Give your paper a short, engaging title. If the main title does not provide a good description of your article’s content, add a brief subtitle. portal uses large type for titles, so shorter titles look much better.
The abstract should briefly introduce your topic, summarize your findings, and explain their possible usefulness. Be sure to use keywords that will later help researchers discover your paper. Many databases display only the title, author, and abstract of a journal article on the first screen, and readers must then decide if they want to download the full text. Many more researchers will read the full article if the abstract piques their interest.
Use the literature review to support your work and to show where your findings add to or diverge from past studies. Make sure your review includes the most important and current writings on your topic. Referees often have concerns with scant literature reviews that cite only older sources or omit seminal works on a topic.
These final sections should synthesize and interpret your findings and make the case for why your article is worth publishing. Many writers fail to explain the importance of their discoveries. The conclusion, especially, should describe what is new in your work and what it contributes to the profession of librarianship.
In portal articles, the “Acknowledgments” section typically appears at the end of the main text, before the author information, appendices, and endnotes. Authors may list those who made contributions to the work but are not coauthors in the acknowledgments, along with their function or contribution. Authors may also acknowledge sources of support, such as grants, in this section.
Survey instruments, rubrics, long lists of participating institutions, and similar materials typically appear in one or more appendices after the main article. If the appendices must be deleted because of space limitations, portal can supply links to such materials in the Project MUSE database. Authors will receive information about how to do so during the manuscript revision process.
The Johns Hopkins University Press allows authors to post manuscripts on their own personal or departmental institutional database or on-line site, in their institutional repositories, and, if required by law, to an open access archive. A copyright agreement between the press and the author is executed at the time the manuscript is sent to the press for publication. The agreement gives the press the right to publish the article, but the author retains permission to use and republish the material if he or she includes a copyright notice.
Articles accepted for publication and copyedited for the upcoming issue of portal are posted on a preprint server hosted by the Journals Division of the Johns Hopkins University Press. There is a link to these articles on the portal homepage, press.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/. portal is available in the Project MUSE collection, muse.jhu.edu/journal/159, and as a paper publication.
We hope that you will enjoy the authoring and publication experience.
Ellysa Stern Cahoy, ellysa@psu.edu, Editor
The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice page.
portal: Libraries and the Academy focuses on qualitative or quantitative research about the role of libraries and librarianship within higher education. Both basic and applied research papers, including case studies, are welcome, as are essays that explore the more theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of librarianship. The desired length is about 25 to 35 pages double-spaced, but we will consider longer manuscripts.
Submissions to portal go through a double-blind review process: the reviewers of the paper do not know who the authors are, nor do the authors know the identity of the reviewers. The managing editor redacts any information or embedded metadata from the manuscript that could identify the authors and sends it to two referees, members of the portal Editorial Board. This review may take from six to nine weeks.
The portal reviewers rate the submission using a standard assessment rubric. It asks the referees to evaluate the manuscript in several areas, including appropriateness to the journal’s readership, originality, literature review, research methodology, and clarity of writing. Theassessment framework asks referees to indicate when a submission has merit but needs additional work before publication. If they determine that an author should revise and resubmit a manuscript, the editor will forward that recommendation to the author. Once the author has incorporated the suggestions of the referees, the revised manuscript will go back for review, usually to the original referees but occasionally to two other members of the Editorial Board. This process may take another six to nine weeks.
Authors should reveal when submitting a manuscript to portal if there has been any prior presentation or publication of the same material or something very similar. Prior presentation does not automatically disqualify a submission, but the editor needs to make a fully informed decision about the novelty of the work. Authors should not submit the same manuscript for review to more than one journal at a time.
Ellysa Stern Cahoy, Penn State University,
ellysa@psu.edu
Marianne Ryan, Loyola University Chicago,
mryan21@luc.edu
Michelle Guittar, Northwestern University,
michelle.guittar@northwestern.edu
Maribeth Slebodnik, University of Arizona,
slebodnik@email.arizona.edu
Mark N. Lenker, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
mark.lenker@unlv.ed
Steven J. Bell, Temple University,
bells@temple.edu
Carmen Cole, Penn State University
ccc143@psu.edu
Anne C. Behler, Penn State University,
portalmanagingeditor@gmail.com
Rebecca S. Albitz, Marist College, rebecca.albitz@marist.ed
Veronica Arellano Douglas, University of Houston, vadouglas@uh.edu
Andrew Asher, Indiana University Bloomington, asherand@indiana.edu
Consuella Askew, Rutgers University Newark, consuella.askew@rutgers.edu
Andrea Baer, Rowan University, baera@rowan.edu
Jennifer Brannock, University of Southern Mississippi, Jennifer.Brannock@usm.edu
Vicki Coleman, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, vcoleman@ncat.edu
Maria Collins, North Carolina State University, mdcollin@ncsu.edu
Donna L. Ferullo, Purdue University, ferullo@purdue.edu
Bob Gerrity, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, robert.gerrity@monash.edu
Damon E. Jaggars, The Ohio State University, jaggars.1@osu.edu
Kate Johnson, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, kate.johnson@unco.edu
Kyle M. L. Jones, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, kmlj@iupui.edu
Hana Kim, University of Toronto, hn.kim@utoronto.ca
Lindsay King, Stanford University, kingl@stanford.edu
Glenn Koelling, University of New Mexico, gkoelling@unm.edu
Karen Kohn, Temple University, karen.kohn@temple.edu
Anne Krakow, Saint Joseph’s University, akrakow@sju.edu
Willie Miller, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, wmmiller@iupui.edu
David Minor, University of California, San Diego, dminor@ucsd.edu
Carmelita Pickett, University of Virginia, cpickett@virginia.edu
Wendy Pothier, University of New Hampshire, Wendy.Pothier@unh.edu
Kyle B. Roberts, Congregational Library & Archives, kroberts@14beacon.org
Juan Carlos Rodriguez, California State University, Los Angeles, Carlos.Rodriguez@calstatela.edu
Jay Satterfield, Dartmouth College, Jay.Satterfield@Dartmouth.Edu
Herbert Snyder, Georgia College & State University, herbert.snyder@gcsu.edu
Thomas H. Teper, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, tteper@uiuc.edu
Sarah Watstein, Seattle University, watsteins@seattleu.edu
Jerome Yavarkovsky, jeromey@bc.edu
Send books for review to:
Maribeth Slebodnik, University of Arizona
slebodnik@email.arizona.edu
Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.
Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.
2005: Todd A. Carpenter, Heather Joseph, and Mary Waltham, “A Survey of Business Trends at BioOne Publishing Partners and its Implications for BioOne,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, 3 (2004): 465–84.
Click here to view the article.
2006: Brian D. Cameron, “Trends in the Use of ISI [Institute for Scientific Information] Bibliometric Data: Uses, Abuses, and Implications,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5, 1 (2005): 105–25.
Click here to view the article.
2007: Corinna Baksik, “Fair Use or Exploitation? The Google Book Search Controversy,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 6, 4 (2006): 399–415.
Click here to view the article.
2008: Amos Lakos, “Evidence-Based Library Management: The Leadership Challenge,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 7, 4 (2007): 431–50.
Click here to view the article.
2009: Sharon K. Epps, “African-American Women Leaders in Academic Research Libraries,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 8, 3 (2008): 255–72.
Click here to view the article
2010: Scott Bennett, “Libraries and Learning: A History of Paradigm Change,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 9, 2 (2009): 181–97.
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2011: Kevin Smith, “Copyright Renewal for Libraries: Seven Steps toward a User-Friendly Law,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10, 1 (2010): 5–27.
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2012: Kathryn Lage, Barbara Losoff, and Jack Maness, “Receptivity to Library Involvement in Scientific Data Curation: A Case Study at the University of Colorado Boulder,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 11, 4 (2011): 915–37.
Click here to view the article
2013: Tyler Walters, “The Future Role of Publishing Services in University Libraries,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 12, 4 (2012): 425–54.
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2014: Jennifer L. Bonnet, Sigrid Anderson Cordell, Jeffery Cordell, Gabriel J. Duque, Pamela J. MacKintosh, and Amanda Peters, “The Apprentice Researcher: Using Undergraduate Researchers’ Personal Essays to Shape Instruction and Services,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13, 1 (2013): 37–59.
Click here to view the article
2015: Ellysa Stern Cahoy and Smiljana Antonijević, “Personal Library Curation: An Ethnographic Study of Scholars’ Information Practices,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 14, 2 (2014): 287–306.
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2016: Richard Fyffe, “The Value of Information: Normativity, Epistemology, and LIS in Luciano Floridi,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 15, 2 (2015): 276–86.
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2017: Eamon Tewell, “Toward the Resistant Reading of Information: Google, Resistant Spectatorship, and Critical Information Literacy,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 16, 2 (2016): 289310.
Click here to view the article
2018: Mark Lenker, “Developmentalism: Learning as the Basis for Evaluating Information,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 17, 4 (2017): 721–37.
Click here to view the article
2019: Stefanie R. Bluemle, “Post-Facts: Information Literacy and Authority after the 2016 Election,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 18, 2 (2018): 265–82.
Click here to view the article
2020: Kyle M. L. Jones,“‘Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should’: Practitioner Perceptions of Learning Analytics Ethics,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 19, 5 (2019): 407–28.
Click here to view the article
2021: Sara Maurice Whitver, “Accessible Library Instruction in Practice,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 20, 2 (2020): 381–98.
Click here to view the article
Carmen Cole, portal's Co-Social Media Editor, interviews Justin Fuhr about his article entitled “Personal Librarian Philosophies: Discovering Meaning in What We Do.”
Hear from the co-authors of the article awarded "Best Article in 2022" - and what they learned from their mix of qualitative and quantitative research with faculty adopters of OER and what factors motivated them to do so.
Transcript can be found here.
We ask three questions of Sarah LeMire, the lead author of the article “Librarians as Teachers: Effecting Change in Composition Instruction” from Volume 23, Issue 2.
Transcript can be found here.
A conversation with Stefanie Bluemle, author of 'Post-facts: Information literacy and authority after the 2016 election,"' published in portal in 2018 and selected as the winning article for the portal 2019 Best Article Award.
Talking with Mark Lenker, author of 'Developmentalism: Learning as the Basis for Evaluating Information', published in portal in 2017 and selected as the winning article for the portal 2018 Best Article Award.
1.097 (2021)
1.297 (Five-Year Impact Factor)
0.00077 (Eigenfactor™ Score)
Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor):
62 of 84 journals, in “Information Science & Library Science”
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