All 3 entries tagged Stage

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

Early Stage Researchers, Peer Review and Editorial Skills Reflections

Reflecting back on early stage researcher training, and thinking about where it might go next year.

Last week I took part in the final workshop of this academic session’s Early Stage Researchers programme. As readers may recall, I’ve been contributing to this programme for the past two years and pop up during the session focussing on publication. My role here is to firstly contribute to the general discussions led by the estimated Harriet Richmond, who facilitates the programme as a whole with great skill. I’m also on-hand to present my own thoughts, reflections and experience on the subtle art of journal editing and peer-reviewing: something about which I do know a thing or two. I will note as well that the session delegates this times were particularly engaged and engaging, which meant contributing was even more of a genuine pleasure than normal.

Now like any good lecturer. each time I’ve presented this session my notes, slides and interactions have subtly evolved. This time around was different. Although I wasn’t planning a major overhaul, alongside a few informational updates, I did find myself doing a revision of the running order for my slides which I felt made for a more coherent narrative. [1] Certainly the reactions in the room on the day were positive, so I’ll take that as a win.

As I have 30 minutes to specifically contribute during the three-hour session, I do like to break up my monologue with some small interactive engagements. These breaks are partly to keep everyone’s attention because the programme is taught online, but also because not even I want to keep hearing my own voice for 30 unbroken minutes: I suspect the session delegates might agree with that point too. As Harriet deploys a lot of breakout group work during her own segments, I didn’t want to adapt the same approach, being ever mindful of offering a variety of content and engagement opportunities. I also realised that even a brief 10-15 minute breakout and any reporting back would use up most of my time. Much as it might create some interesting conversations, I concluded it did seem to be the most effective way to offer a rich vein of content to the delegates.

The first exercise which focussed on delegate perceptions of editorial key skills, and mapping them back to their own attitudes, has worked well as an ice breaker for a few iterations of my session now. I am certainly quite pleased about how it’s worked, so don’t feel there is any great need to change it up – currently anyway. Conversely, the peer-reviewer exercise I’ve used, which is where I got delegates to rank a number of statements on an axis never quite clicked the way I hoped it would. I’ve concluded while a useful tool, it is actually an exercise which would probably work better in a physical classroom environment - somewhere where we could dig into the perceptions and reactions in a lot more detail and perhaps spark off some debate. Hence, this time I decided to retired this venerable session tool, and move to a new intervention.

This new excersise centred on the introduction of some peer-reviewer case study conundrums – based on real world examples I’ve encountered – and then asked the delegates to offer their own solutions. Given most of the delegates had limited peer-reviewing experience, I estimated how exposing them to some real-world challenges would better contextualise what I had to say about reviewing praxis in the rest of the talk. Obviously, I had example answers on hand for how I actually approached the reviewing challenges, but I was delighted to see the delegates really getting to grips with these: in some cases offering some very enlightened solutions.

Notably, as I’d been talking through the ideas of ‘ethical reviewing practices’ just ahead of the exercise, I was rather hoping they might step away from purely functional answers and offer solutions embracing these sort of practices. I am pleased to report in this and other regards the exercise seemed to be a success. It also served to spark some ideas in my mind for a longer peer-review focussed workshop [2] alongside helping shape an excellent discussion among the delegate group. Indeed, I’ve also been talking to one or two them post-event about these areas, so I’m definitely happy with how it worked in engendering some great conversations.

Anyway, as the next iteration of this course isn’t now until the autumn term I can safely retire my notes for now. Well, – aside from thinking at the back of my head quite how I’ll reshape my contribution for the next version [3].

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Endnotes

[1] Since imploring authors for a coherent narrative is a common feedback request I send out, I thought I should really practice what I preach here.

[2] Perhaps this might pop up in Accolade or elsewhere. Who knows – not overly sure I’ve sufficient time currently to really develop it anyway. Maybe if there’s a big demand for it from the researcher community…

[3] And this is assuming I’m asked back to contribute to the programme. I do hope so, but nothing’s set in stone!

Gareth Johnson : 21 May 2024 16:28 |  Tags: Early Peer-Review Reflections Researchers Stage Training Workshops |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Early–Stage Researchers – Special Issue Invitation Launched

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/special-issues

A new special issue project is launched, tying into a researcher developmental course.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Warwick’s Leadership and Management Development Course on reflective practice for early-stage researchers. The course, which is being run three times this year aims to generate some discussion and exchange of experience between researchers who are early in their career and are looking to broaden their understanding of the wider research landscape. Yesterday’s session was focussed in on writing and publication, which was why I was there: to offer insights into the art of peer-reviewing and editing journals.

While only a relatively small cohort of delegates, there were some excellent and perceptive questions and insights shared, and I think considerable interest in what I had to say! The course will be running with two further researcher cohorts this academic year, and I’ll be popping up in each of these as well. It certainly is nice to interact with some scholars I’ve not met before, and who for once, aren’t directly linked to the IAS. I am also looking forward to learning more about new researchers’ perceptions of academic authorship and scholarly publications too.

Synergistically we’ve also partnered with the LMD [1] to launch a special issue call tied to this course. In it, delegates are being invited to submit critical reflections around their research practice inspired by or promoted by the course contents themselves. Naturally, we hope a few of the course participants might also get involved as associate editors for the issue too, so we’ll see how that develops over time. I suspect there will be some very interesting papers submitted to the issue on the basis of what I heard yesterday.

Special Issue - Early-Stage Researcher Reflections: [Anticipated Publication - 2023]
This special issue is devoted to participants within the three cohorts of the Warwick Leadership and Management Development course for developing early-stage researchers. Course delegates are being invited to submit critical reflections concerning their own research practice. These are expected to be inspired by their experiences, insights or considerations arising from the course contents and discussions with their peers. Manuscripts may opt to provide a holistic overview of the researchers’ experiences or choose to focus in on particular aspects of their life and work.

Find out more about all our past, present and future (!) special issues here:

https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/special-issues

My thanks to Dr Harriet Richmond of the LMD for the invitation to get involved in this course, and for proposing the special issue too!

Endnotes

[1] Which I now realise is also the same acronym as Life Model Decoy in the MCU

Gareth Johnson : 10 Nov 2022 10:59 |  Tags: Academic Authorship Course Early Issue Researchers Special Stage Workshop |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem