[author]CISLS
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Quarterly AJLS News | selected for the JCR 2023 Impact Factor Q2 Region list!
On 20 June 2024, the highly anticipated Clarivate Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR™) was released, which provides comprehensive coverage of high-quality journals, combining the four major databases of the Web of Science, including Social Sciences Citation Index™ (SSCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index™ (ESCI) journals, and for the first time, ranks journals according to subject categories, emphasizing the value and impact of emerging journals and journals focused on subdisciplines or regions.
As the first English-language journal of law and society in Asia, Asian Journal of Law and Society, published by the China Institute of Socio-Legal Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Cambridge University Press, has performed well in 2023: JIF and JCI ranked 186th and 185th out of a total of 421 journals in the category of law, ranking in Q2 region; and the Total Citations have increased year by year, reaching 187; the impact radiates to many research fields such as Asian issues, sociology of law, international human rights, computational jurisprudence, etc., and the papers published have been cited by many high-impact journals.
The co-editors-in-chief, editorial board and editorial team of AJLS would like to express their sincere gratitude to all guest editors, authors, reviewers and readers! The steady development and innovation of the journal cannot be achieved without the trust and support of all colleagues! Looking ahead, AJLS will continue to expand the channels for Asian sociology of law issues to build an interdisciplinary, cross-border and cross-civilization knowledge community!
About the Journal
The Asian Journal of Law and Society (AJLS) is published by the Centre for Sociology of Law at the KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (now materialized as the China Institute of Socio-Legal Studies, an interdisciplinary platform of Shanghai Jiao Tong University), in association with Cambridge University Press. The journal was officially launched in 2014, and is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. It is the first sociology of law journal in China, the first English-language sociology of law journal in Asia, and the only Asia-centred sociology of law journal in the world. This international academic journal has steadily progressed from two series per year at the beginning of its publication to four series per year, accommodating more high-quality and rich academic results. The journal is ranked in Q2 in the 2023 Impact Factor rankings, with a 2023 CiteScore of 1.5 in the Scopus database, 318th out of 1025 publications in Law, and 639th out of 1466 publications in Social and Political Sciences. The journal currently receives 60,000 downloads per year from the Cambridge website alone, and close to 100,000 downloads per year when third-party platforms such as ProQuest are included, and has gained nearly 8,000 institutional subscribers. It has been promoted at international conferences such as the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Annual Conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA)[1] , the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the British Sociological Association (BSA), the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, International Society of Public Law[2] (ICONS), the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS)[3] , the European Society of International Law (ESIL), the Regional Conference of the Asian Society of International Law (China)[4] , the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA), and others, showing a gratifying influence.
Recommendation for Editor-in-Chief
AsianJLS, an English-language international journal, was initially created to provide a forum for sociology of law researchers from all over the world who are interested in China and Asia, and to provide a channel for sociology of law researchers in China and Asia to express their views to the international academic community. Originally, Asia is only a simple geographical concept. However, Asia is home to all the different religions, legal systems, institutions and civilizations established by mankind so far, and therefore has unlimited diversity, opportunities for choice and unfathomable potential for development. This mandala of diversity makes it difficult to reach consensus in Asia, as the Chinese story of the ‘blind men feeling the elephant’ suggests.
To a considerable extent, it can be said that only through continuous discourse communication and empirical analysis of empirical science can an interdisciplinary, cross-border and cross-civilization community of knowledge be constructed, and the misunderstanding and ignorance caused by diversity can be overcome, and thus it is hoped that a synergy of systemic innovation and reconstruction of the order in the twenty-first century can be formed on this basis. It is in this process that China and Asia will become the forefront of social transformation and the most active academic circle for the exchange of ideas; accordingly, the centre of gravity of sociology of law will inevitably change, with more emphasis on interactive relationships and networks of meanings, and more emphasis on multi-layered and diversified normative systems. In this era of radical change, risk and uncertainty, I hope that this journal will be able to testify to the following three basic propositions about the community of human destiny and good law and good governance - that intercommunication is the smallest unit of society; that intellectual discourse can produce the structure of the future; and that practical experience is the test of truth.