Sarah Bologna, Research and Editorial Director

In 2013, Sarah established her own editing business, based in Ireland. Developmental editing—now a quickly growing field, but little known a decade ago—is at its core. She has a loyal client list of both well-established and emerging scholars from all over the world, particularly the Global South, including South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Singapore, Indonesia, India, and China.

Through developmental editing, Sarah helps academics to develop and refine compelling arguments, and thus produce convincing, well-structured publications, working from the whole to the parts as well as the other way round. Her editing thereby goes well beyond copyediting and adds real value, rather than just ‘inductive bridging’ to manuscripts: she guides her clients on how to put life into their texts.

Sarah has also been mentoring and teaching writing to PhD candidates for over 20 years, beginning while she was working at universities in South Africa (Fort Hare and Stellenbosch), and continuing on her return to Ireland, both one-to-one online, and in on-the-ground workshops in the Global South, most recently Pretoria, South Africa, September 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, July 2024 and Oaxaca, Mexico, June 2025.

In 2016, Sarah was appointed managing editor of Tropical Conservation Science, a peer-review journal with a focus on research from the tropical belt. In this capacity she sees a disproportionate percentage of submissions from the Global South that have promise but require more development than the journal can provide. This position has given her a deep appreciation of how journals operate, and the most common barriers to publication—and has ignited a passion for redressing the imbalance that leaves scholars from the Global South deeply underrepresented in the global research landscape.

She is also the copyeditor for several SAGE journals, including the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, the Journal of Management, and Exceptional Children, and in this capacity has had many years of experience finetuning peer-reviewed articles in the last step before publication. In sum, Sarah has comprehensive experience of the full spectrum of academic writing and publishing activities.