Special Issues, Impact, and Our Readership

It is our great pleasure to present the final issue of the 39th volume of the CALICO Journal. Next year, we will celebrate our 40th anniversary, culminating in the CALICO 2023 Conference at the University of Minnesota in early June. During the past decade, the CALICO Journal has recognized the importance of special issues, drawing on our membership to suggest topics that resonate with our readership and move our field forward. Since 2014, we have published no fewer than eight special issues. We often ask ourselves whether special issues are “worth it,” as they require much more coordination and planning and careful thought as to how best to balance a focus on emerging topics of specific interest with “general” issues, where a more diverse range of themes is represented. Surely, there are advantages to publishing special issues. However, the scant literature on the possible advantage special issues have over “regular” issues is mixed. Some research suggests that special issues may offer the potential benefits of attracting more submissions, improving impact, and increasing profits for publishers (Repiso et al., 2021). In this study, 75% of the journals examined achieved a higher average impact factor with articles published in special issues than they did with articles in regular issues. However, there did not appear to be a significant relationship between the percentage of articles a journal publishes in special issues and the overall impact of that same journal. This suggests that publishing a special issue will not necessarily attract articles with a big impact, as there are other factors that may affect that impact, such as the topic of the issue and the identity of the guest editors. In contrast, Lee and co-workers (2019) report that general issue papers are more frequently cited in academia, but special issue papers show a better