All 3 entries tagged 2024

Discussing Reviewer Suitability & Citation Justice with Early Stage Scholars

The first training session of the new academic session brought discussions around reviewer quality.

This week I had the pleasure of contributing to Harriet Richmond’s early-stage researcher session focussing on publication. As blog readers will be aware, I’ve been feeding into these sessions for almost three years now, around once a term generally. As always it was a pleasure to collaborate with Harriet, who is a great teacher and all round good-egg. Certainly I always come away with some thoughts on improving my own teaching, or new piece of information to ruminate upon, so being involved is always a win-win for me.

I also enjoy participating because these workshop sessions are also a wonderful opportunity to share some of my personal experiences as an editor and reviewer with researchers who are a little earlier in their career track than I. The hope is – like this week’s cohort – that it sparks some conversation and perhaps demystifies the area a little. I do often feel it’s a shame that in the post-pandemic period we’ve kept the workshops online only, which perhaps slightly curtails a more free-flowing exchange of thoughts and ideas. That might be a personal preference for ‘live’ performance in my teaching, and I can see why the delegates enjoy not having to schlep into campus for the sessions: less time away from the lab and office probably pays them dividends in a busy schedule. No matter, as always, this week’s exchange online was still good enough to pick up on a few new threads of conversation.

This time around I introduced ideas of citation justice, as discussed in our recent podcast, into the debate. This arose out of a delegate discussion about questionable citation habits and bias within them. It was handy to be able to talk a little about these concepts and highlight some of the ideas around introducing a ‘beneficial bias’: although, I should note that for now Exchanges has no hard and fast policy in this area. All the same, I’ll be looking forward to reading the Reinvention report, and perhaps kicking off some policy discussions with my Board as a result. Getting better and broader representation within article citations can only benefit readers, researchers and authors alike in my opinion.

We also got into an interesting debate over journals/editors and their ability to pick ‘quality’ reviewers. Now, if you’re an editor you probably don’t need me to tell you how challenging it can be, with the hundreds of thousands [1] of manuscripts annually in need of multiple reviewers, especially with academics’ time increasingly stretched across so many research, teaching and administration priorities. With this initial hill to climb just to get >any< reviewers on board, conceptualisations of also judging their quality beyond a simple visit to their personal/professional website [2] sounds like an even bigger slope to ascend. As journal editors we offer lots of guidance to reviewers on how to do a quality job, as well as advising reviewers about those times when they feel they might be out-of-scope for a particular paper [3]. Truth be told though, much of the responsibility for invalidating a reviewer does seem to fall on the prospective reviewers’ shoulders themselves. It’s a bit of a sector norm, and perhaps one which deserves some greater consideration – I’ve certainly been inspired to look around and see what other journals are doing. Perhaps a small debate among my editorial team is also worthwhile following up on these conversations too – we do have a Board meeting scheduled for next month after all!

This week’s session also saw the second running of my ‘you are the reviewer!’ case study challenge, wherein the delegates had to make a judgement on several not-so-hypothetical reviewing problems. Once again the delegates rose to the challenge well, and it was good to see that the approach we had adopted in each case – the examples being anonymised but real ones – seemed to chime with the views of the scholars present. I might tweak the examples for the next running of the course in the new year though, just to avoid things becoming too staid or stale.

So, a good session from my perspective, and I hope from the delegates too. I think my next task is to take that annual look at my teaching notes and think about how my contribution could be tweaked or improved. I certainly got the feeling this time, that another refresh of the slides and accompanying interactions could do with another polish!

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Endnotes

[1] Almost certainly more when you consider how many articles are rejected annually. With a ~50% decline rate for Exchanges the 68 articles we published this years therefore equates to ~140 submissions as a back of the envelope calculation. And we’re a relatively small journal with a small ingest of article submissions!

[2] Or of course knowing them in person.

[3] Doubly tricky for interdisciplinary papers where few, if anyone other than the author, will be entirely conversant with the paper’s themes, methodologies and methods.

Gareth Johnson : 07 Nov 2024 09:13 |  Tags: 2024 Development Early November Researchers Stage Training |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Attending the International Research Culture Conference 2024

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/research/ncrc/ircc/

Second research culture conference is a time to celebrate and look to the future.

Yesterday I went along as Exchanges Chief Editor to attend the second International Research Culture Conference(IRCC '24), hosted at Warwick once more. As readers will remember at the 2023 event we launched our collaboration with the National Centre for Research Culture and the work began towards producing our first research culture special issue. That came out last month, and if you haven’t read it yet – you really should.

Yesterday was a chance, alongside listening to a range of informative and engaging speakers, to celebrate this publication a little. More importantly thought it was a chance to announce the call for the next research culture special issue – arising from this year’s conference. That, and of course my call for more associate editors to get involved. Delegates to the event will soon have a mailshot with more information about that.

It was a long day, but another one where I spent most of the moments between sessions talking to various delegates about the journal, our plans and how they can get involved. My thanks to everyone who stopped by our stall for a little chat – and I hope you enjoyed our little bits of promotional merchandise too. And my thanks to the NCRC for working with us once again in launching this second exciting issue call.

Next up though, my focus will be swinging firmly back onto the MRC @ 50 special issue – coming very, very soon to your screens.

Gareth Johnson : 17 Sep 2024 09:23 |  Tags: 2024 Conference Culture Ircc Issue Launch Ncrc Research Special |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Issue 11(2) of Exchanges Has been Published

Writing about web page https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2

The spring issue of Exchanges is here, bringing with it a wonderful assortment of articles.

As many of you have noticed the new issue of Exchanges was published today. As always this is the end point of many months of effort by diligent authors, reviewers and editors, to whom I’d like to express my thanks.

This issue we are especially excited to be able to bring you many of the papers we hoped to include in a special volume on the effects of plurality on translation. Regrettably for one reason or another many of the papers we had for this issue (submitted a year or two back) didn’t make it to the end. What we do have though in this issue is a wonderful selection of those which have reached publication status. Rather than hold on any longer, we agreed to publish them as a special section in the journal.[1]

On top of this we’ve some other cracking articles outside the theme to share with you as well – here’s the TOC for your ease of access and reading.

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Mark Pope et al. Pushing the Boundaries of Reflection: The Answer’s on a postcard. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1245

Rita Augestad Knudsen. Mental Health Exemptions to Criminal Responsibility: Between law, medicine, politics and security. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 29-54. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1369

Lisa M Thomas at al. Assembling with VR: Dancing in a more than human world. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 55-83. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1498

Cristina Peligra. Voices and/of Places: The English translation of Helga Ruebsamen’s Het lied en de waarheid (The Song and The Truth) as a case study of identity and plurality in translation. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2) 84-106. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1141

Natalia Rodriguez Blanco. Plurilingual Perspectives, Pluricultural Contexts: A case study on Agence-France Presse news coverage about the plurinational State of Bolivia in Spanish, French, and English. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 107-132. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1137

Alka Vishwakarma. Translating Ramayana: Plurilingual to pluricultural. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 133-160. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1144

Luis Damián Moreno García. Subtitling Hong Kong Code-Mixing and Code-Switching: The case of Netflix English and Spanish official subtitles for Hongkonese audiovisual creations. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 161-187. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1155

Jonathan Vickery. Critical Reflections on Universities, Publishing, and the Early Career Experience. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 188-202. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1583

Liam Greenacre. Postdisciplinary Knowledge, Edited by Tomas Pernecky. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2), 203-208. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1464

Gareth J Johnson. Five Minutes to Midnight: Editorial, Volume 11, Part 2. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(2) i-xiii. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1606

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Of course you could always access the issue as a whole directly:

https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2 & https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/issue/view/98

The next issue of Exchanges will be one of our summer special issues – which one I can’t say for sure – so watch out for that as the days grow longer, warmer and maybe even drier here in the UK.

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Endnotes

[1] There are two or three more papers for this special issue which are still under review and development, which we hope to be able to share with you in the October issue of the journal.

Gareth Johnson : 26 Apr 2024 16:45 |  Tags: 2024 Exchanges Issue Journal New Published |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem