Many of today’s policy questions require an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from fields such as neuroscience, biology, and statistics. Researchers today are presented with new technologies to gather data and novel techniques for data mining. However, innovative scholarship often fails to leave its subspecialty and reach an interdisciplinary audience, dulling its impact and preventing other disciplines from capitalizing on new findings.
The Journal of Science and Law (JSciLaw) seeks to address this problem as an interdisciplinary publication that provides a forum for scholarship at the intersection of scientific research and legal policy. JSciLaw aims to unite disciplines and to encourage collaboration between scientific researchers, legal scholars, and policy makers. Reflecting its interdisciplinary nature, the JSciLaw editorial board includes scholars from the fields of neuroscience, law, criminology, statistics, and policy.
JSciLaw promotes top-tier, peer-reviewed scientific research that matters for policy decisions. Reflecting that mission, we are pioneering in-house journal software that allows JSciLaw to incorporate large-scale data directly into its manuscripts, such that reported results are replicable and extensible (See here for an example). In this way, readers are not forced to simply believe the claims of research papers published in JSciLaw, but can analyze the data themselves.
The journal is open-access, with all articles available for free at JSciLaw.org. Because we are an online journal, we are de-emphasizing word limits in deference to quality: articles should be as long as they need to be (but no longer). We publish Original Research Articles, Reviews, Opinions, and occasionally, Book Reviews. Papers are published on a rolling basis as soon as they are accepted.
JSciLaw encourages you to submit your innovative research and to explore our research articles in the future.
David M. Eagleman, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Director, Center for Science and Law
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
