Where to publish research on lingcomm
I love seeing linguistics communication work, and the wonderful ways people do lingcomm to bring linguistics to new audiences. I do lingcomm as part of my job as an academic, which means that I also love seeing people share what they learnt about lingcomm with academic audiences. As my Lingthusiasm cohost Gretchen McCulloch says, it's great to explain linguistics to public audiences, and it's great to explain public audiences to linguists (and other academics).
Lingcomm research does not have a dedicated publishing venue. There are sometimes edited books with chapter contributions or maybe journal special issues. This does not mean there are not avenues for publishing about lingcomm work. I've learnt a lot building and maintaining the LingComm Bibliography, and thought I'd share what I learnt about linguistics and non-linguistics venues for publishing.
Language and Linguistics Compass has a long history of publishing excellent lingcomm work. This journal operates on a slightly odd "invitation" model, but you can always pitch your idea to the lead editor for Education & Pedagogy and see how things go. Really good for overviews and big picture topics.
Innovations in Linguistics Education does not say so explicitly on their website at the moment, but they’re open to discussions of linguistics education in all contexts, including lingcomm contexts. It is just starting out, but I appreciate that it's a diamond open access journal, meaning it's free to publish and read content.
Linguistics Vanguard is an online journal for short (3000 word) articles about innovative approaches in all major areas of linguistics. They publish on lingcomm, I know this in part from doing the bibliography and in part because I'm currently (2024-2026) an Area Editor with lingcomm as one of my listed specialisations.
Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) is the journal outside linguistics that most aligns with lingcomm. It's also great because it's a diamond open access journal. They run a whole series called "Practice Insights” about specific projects and their success, which are under 5000 words. I know with some scicomm journals there can be a challenge in convincing them that linguistics is a topic in scicomm (argh), so might require some careful framing.
It can also be good to check in with your area or specialisation journal and encourage them to accept papers about engaging the public in linguistics. I always want to see more research about effective and successful lingcomm projects. And, of course, if you do publish something, don't forget to add it to the LingComm Bibliography so I can keep up to date with suggestions for where to publish!
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