https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986218824675
Gifted Child Quarterly
2019, Vol. 63(2) 83–85
© 2019 National Association for
Gifted Children
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DOI: 10.1177/0016986218824675
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Editorial
As we continue into our second year as Editors of Gifted
Child Quarterly (GCQ), we are very excited to be able to
share the changes we have been working to implement for
the journal in the types of manuscripts accepted, in keywords
for manuscripts and reviewers, and in GCQ’s commitment to
open science practices. As Editors, we spent much of our
first year making improvements to our procedures, email
templates, and timelines, and now with these behind-the-
scenes changes mostly completed we are ready to take some
big steps that will position GCQ as an education leader in
moving our research practices forward. During our planning
process, we have consulted with our editorial team, with edi-
tors of other special education journals, with experts from
other disciplines, with members of two working groups that
we formed, and with the SAGE publishing team. We are con-
scious of the value of our journal’s page space, and as always,
we will continue to reserve as much of it as possible for pub-
lishing high-quality research; however, to most effectively
share these exciting new changes, we have decided to
describe briefly both the changes themselves and our ratio-
nale for making them here, in the journal’s pages, where
these will be most visible to our readership.
Types of Manuscripts Accepted
In the past, GCQ has only had submission guidelines for
Feature Articles, although Methods Briefs also have been
accepted under previous editors. Beginning in 2019, GCQ
will now accept four types of articles. We continue to accept
Feature Articles as our primary article type; Feature Articles
share research findings and new, creative insights about gift-
edness, talent development, creativity, advanced academics,
and individual differences in all contexts. We now also have
formalized the acceptance of Methods Briefs. The purpose of
these is to provide our readers and the field with focused
articles that are instructive and that address quantitative,
qualitative, and/or mixed methods topics within the context
of our field so that the practice of gifted education research
may be improved.
To encourage the submission of research that does not war-
rant a full Feature Article (e.g., a replication or extension of a
previously published study, an executive summary of a large
study or group of studies, research that has an original empirical
or theoretical contribution but is smaller or narrower in scope),
we now will also accept Brief Reports as a third manuscript
format. Finally, as we share in the Transparency and Openness
section below, as a part of our commitment to open science
practices, we now accept Registered Reports. This format
of submissions helps minimize bias in science by providing
peer-review feedback prior to the research being conducted.
The SAGE GCQ website (http://www.sagepub.com/journals
/Journal201850#submission-guidelines) now includes the spe-
cific submission guidelines and further information for authors
regarding each of these four types of manuscripts.
Keywords
One of our primary goals as editors is to foster high-quality
reviews of manuscripts. These reviews serve two purposes: (1)
to help researchers improve their manuscripts, whether they
eventually are published in GCQ or in another venue; and (2)
to ensure the high quality of research and writing published in
GCQ. To foster this goal, we strive to have a minimum of
three, and ideally four, reviews for each manuscript. Each
manuscript also is read and reviewed by an assigned Associate
Editor and Editor who synthesize the reviewers’ feedback and
who may add additional feedback not identified by the review-
ers. We rely heavily on our strong Editorial Board as well as
on our ad hoc reviewers to provide reviews that are both
thoughtful and timely. To better match the expertise of our
reviewers with the content and methods of the manuscripts we
receive, we have revised our keywords. Now, in addition to
selecting from among a more concise list of keywords, we will
require authors and reviewers to indicate content keywords
separately from methods keywords. We also intend that by
adopting a more consistent set of keywords, GCQ articles will
become easier to locate via keyword searches.
824675GCQ XX X 10.1177/0016986218824675Gifted Child QuarterlyAdelson and Matthews
editorial 2019
1
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
2
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jill L. Adelson, Duke University, Talent Identification Program, 300 Fuller
Street, Durham, NC 27701, USA.
Email: GCQuarterly@gmail.com
Gifted Child Quarterly’s Commitment to
Transparency, Openness, and Research
Improvement
Jill L. Adelson
1
and Michael S. Matthews
2