Research on Language and Social Interaction

Journal overview

Aims and scope

The journal publishes the highest quality empirical and theoretical research bearing on language as it is used in interaction.

Researchers in communication, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, and ethnography are likely to be the most active contributors, but we welcome submission of articles from the broad range of interaction researchers.

Published papers will normally involve the close analysis of naturally-occurring interaction. The journal is also open to theoretical essays and to quantitative studies where these are tied closely to the results of naturalistic observation.

Peer Review Policy: All articles have undergone anonymous double anonymized review.

Brief History of ROLSI

The journal has an intriguing pre-history as Papers in Linguistics (first published 1969), edited by Tony Vanek, which published adventurous and often unconventional essays. (Curious readers can still read such papers as "Organismic communicology: a second prologue - Reflection, shadow, and illusion", in volume 14 via on the publishers' webpages.)

The journal as we know now it started when Stuart Sigman took over Papers in Linguistics on the death of Tony Vanek in 1987. He renamed it Research on Language in Social Interaction, putting out a double issue on multi-channel codes. Thereafter Robert Sanders took on the responsibilities of Editor (with Sigman staying on as Associate Editor), and widened the network of reviewers and contributors to better capture the field of work implied in the title of the journal.

It didn't take long after the move to publishing interactional research before the success of the journal attracted the interest of an ambitious publisher, and the firm of Lawrence Erlbaum bought the title in 1993. That gave the journal the professional support to publish quarterly.

The journal prospered under the continued editorship of Bob Sanders, and thereafter Karen Tracy, Don Zimmerman and Kristine Fitch, with an average editorial reign of about five years. While Fitch was editor, Erlbaum was taken over by Taylor and Francis, who are now our publishers.

The journal has long been international in scope, contributors and readership, and when Charles Antaki took over as Editor in 2010, he was the first from outside the USA. He has been joined since 2019 by the distinguished scholar Leelo Keevallik as Associate Editor.

Past editors:
Tony Vanek (when Papers in Linguistics)
Stuart Sigman
Robert Sanders
Karen Tracy
Don Zimmerman
Kristine Fitch

Publication office: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106.