Working Papers

About the WP Series

The COMPASSS Working Papers series publishes work-in-progress with a connection to configurational comparative methods such as crisp-set QCA, multi-value QCA, fuzzy-set QCA, and linked methods and techniques. The WP series was instituted in 2002 as an informal forum to publish work-in-progress and re-launched in 2009 as a peer reviewed working paper series.

» COMPASSS Working Papers Archive

As of 2017, all working papers are available via Zotero. If you use Zotero and wish to add the group to your installation, please visit the group page and click the “Join” button on the group page. You will need to log into your Zotero account.

Managing Editor

Claude Rubinson (University of Houston-Downtown, USA)

Submission Procedure

If you would like to publish your working paper in the COMPASSS WP Series, please submit your manuscript to the managing editor, Claude Rubinson. Your manuscript should be in PDF format and fully anonymized so that it does not include any identifying information (e.g., do not include your name in the file name, check that references to your own work are in the third-person, etc.). Please also include the title and abstract (but no other identifying information) on the first page of your manuscript, as that is the file we will send out for review. Other than this, there are no requirements regarding the formatting of your manuscript; authors may use whatever format is appropriate for their discipline or target journal. Figures and tables may be placed in the body of the text or at the end. Every submitted paper will be examined by the managing editor and two reviewers, who are asked for a general statement about the quality of the paper and to provide the author(s) with some comments in a few bullet-points (strong/weak points). Reviewers are normally members of the advisory board, but external reviewers are recruited on occasion. The managing editor will decide, based on the review reports, whether the paper meets the quality standards for publication in the Working Paper series.

After publication, authors are free to submit their paper to a journal or to publish the paper elsewhere. Authors retain full copyright. As a courtesy to our reviewers we do expect authors not to submit their work simultaneously to other journals or working papers series while the paper is under review with us.

Checklist: For empirical QCA projects, below is a list of common omissions. Not all QCA projects include each of these items but reviewers generally expect them to be present. If any of the below are omitted, your paper probably needs to explain why. If space limitations preclude you from including all of the below items, they may be included as attachments for an online appendix. If you have any questions, please email the managing editor of Working Papers series.

  1. Do you explain your calibration procedures? If you used the direct method of calibration, do you discuss the lower threshold, crossover point, and upper threshold for each of your conditions?
  2. Do you include your calibrated dataset? If not, please explain why.
  3. Do you detail the parameters for your analysis (e.g., frequency and consistency thresholds as well as the software used)?
  4. Do you include a discussion of necessity testing? If not, do you explain why not?
  5. Do you include your truth table(s)?
  6. Do you present and discuss the complete range of sufficiency solutions (i.e., complex, intermediate, and parsimonious)? If not, do you explain why not?
  7. Do you discuss how you arrived at the sufficiency solution(s) that you chose to present?

If you have any questions, please contact the managing editor, Claude Rubinson.

Comparative Methods for Systematic Cross-Case Analysis