From Continuity to Character

Abstract

Editorial: From Continuity to Character

A third edition changes the question. The first asks whether a journal can begin. The second asks whether it can continue. By the third, the question becomes more uncomfortable, and perhaps more important: what exactly is this journal becoming? Beginning carries its own excitement. Continuation carries reassurance. But a third edition brings something different. It introduces expectation. Readers no longer encounter the journal as a new arrival whose intentions are still being explained; they begin to recognize patterns. Authors notice what kinds of scholarship are being welcomed. Reviewers become familiar with the standards expected of them. Editors discover which principles survive contact with the practical messiness of publishing and which sounded much easier when written in policy documents. An institutional memory begins to form. That matters. A journal does not acquire an identity because its website contains an aims-and-scope statement. Identity emerges slowly, manuscript by manuscript, decision by decision, correction by correction, sometimes through choices that appear almost trivial at the time. Which questions are taken seriously? Which methodological weaknesses are challenged? How much patience is offered to a promising early-career researcher whose argument is not yet fully formed? When does encouragement become indulgence? When does rigor become unnecessary gatekeeping? Does interdisciplinary scholarship genuinely receive room to breathe, or is interdisciplinarity praised in principle while disciplinary boundaries remain intact in practice? By a third edition, these questions can no longer be postponed indefinitely.