It is with great joy and anticipation that we celebrate the relaunch of the Southwest Journal of Arts & Sciences (SJAS) on the University of the Southwest website. On behalf of the editorial team, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Lopez for their consistent support in making this transition successful and to Shaye Smith for the exceptional work on the professional web design. I also want to take this opportunity to thank our authors, editors, and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable contributions to the success of the journal.
One new feature I want to highlight is that we became a Crossref member in March 2024. Crossref is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to improving scholarly communications. Membership enables us to connect our content to a global network of online scholarly research, which includes over 19,000 members across approximately 150 countries. Crossref manages the world’s largest registry of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and metadata for scholarly research, facilitating an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions annually. This makes research objects easier to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. According to Crossref’s monthly resolution reports, all of our DOIs were resolved (accessed) up to 299 times by December 2024. In December alone, our three unique DOIs for dissertations had 97 total resolutions, while our nine unique DOIs for SJAS articles had 80 total resolutions.
For doctoral candidates and research chairs: if you would like a dissertation to be assigned a DOI, please send me the student’s name, dissertation title, URL link, and year of publication. I will ensure that a DOI is added to the dissertation.
Additionally, I encourage all scholars to register for ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a free, unique, and persistent identifier (PID) for individuals engaging in research, scholarship, and innovation. Registration is free of charge and allows researchers to be uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time. By using ORCID, researchers can spend more time conducting their work and less time managing it. A link to ORCID registration can be found on the journal website.
SJAS serves as a platform for the exchange of information on topics in natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and more. We accept various formats, including full-length and letter-length research papers, reflective articles, review articles, work-in-progress reports on promising developments, case studies, and best practice articles written by scholars such as faculty, staff, and students. SJAS is published annually, but we are open to publishing additional issues as needed. To ensure the rapid dissemination of information, we aim to complete the review process for each paper within 1–3 months of initial submission.
We are currently preparing to publish the 2024 issue, which is expected to be available by April. Please check the flyer and Call for Papers on the journal website. We encourage more contributions to ensure the continued success of the journal and welcome any comments or suggestions that could help us improve its quality. We look forward to reading your submissions soon.
You can access SJAS at: https://www.usw.edu/academics/sjas
Best regards,
Yusheng Wu
Editor-in-Chief