An invitation to social scientists

The use of computational methods and tools to deepen our understanding of long-standing questions in the social sciences — also known as computational social science — has been quickly growing in recent years¹. Much of this growth can be attributed to the increasing availability of data — such as social media data, mobile-phone data, digitized books and historical documents, and health-care records, to name a few — which has created unprecedented research opportunities to test existing social-science theories but also to uncover new ones. Computational social science has also demonstrated its potential for social impact^2,3 and as we quickly reach the United Nations’ self-imposed 2030 deadline for addressing the Sustainable Development Goals, which cover the numerous challenges that society is currently facing, the field has become more important and critical than ever.

We at Nature Computational Science are committed to providing a venue for fostering the continuous development of this burgeoning field, and we encourage computational social scientists to submit their high-quality research to our journal.

But what are we looking for in terms of scope? When it comes to primary research papers, we are mostly interested in studies that have resulted in the development of new computational methods, models, or resources — or in the use of existing ones in novel, creative ways — for greatly advancing the understanding of broadly important questions in the social sciences or for translating data into meaningful interventions in the real world. For Nature Computational Science, computational novelty — be it in developing a new method or in using an existing one — is key. Studies without a substantial novelty in the development or use of computational tools can also be considered as long as the implications of those studies are relevant and important to the computational science community. It goes without saying that all of the other criteria that we follow to assess research papers⁴ are also applicable here. In addition to primary research, we also welcome non-primary articles⁵ (such as Review articles and commentary pieces), which can be used to discuss recent computational advances within a given social-science area, as well as to cover other issues pertinent to the community, including scientific, commercial, ethical, legal, or societal concerns.

Even though we do not have a particular limitation in terms of areas within the social sciences that we consider, there are some areas and topics on which we are particularly keen, including human and urban mobility, computational psychology and cognition, digital humanities, computational linguistics, and the science of science. We are also interested in studies that help with understanding, mitigating, and addressing a number of social issues, such as misinformation and disinformation, biases and inequalities, food security, poverty, and so forth.

We have created a Collection in which our readers can browse manuscripts published by Nature Computational Science that are relevant to computational social science — and we will update this collection as new content is published.

Interested in publishing your computational social science research with us? If you have any questions regarding scope, please reach out to us. Authors can also submit pre-submission inquiries to our manuscript system, which we use to assess the suitability of papers to our journal. We await your research!