Multilitteratus Incognitus

Part III of my 2024 all the thiiiiiings (read that with an echo😁) ponderings, and attempt to wayfind my way out around the academy... This part deals with researching, writing, and peer review. Some things I've already decided that I am not doing anymore.  Some things I've decided I may be doing a bit of.  And, other things are in limbo... So let me start with a bold proclamation: I am no longer doing peer reviewing *!  Over the last 15 years, I've been peer reviewing for a variety of journals. Initially, I found the process valuable and I was really happy to contribute to the overall discussion in the field(s) that I am active in. Since COVID I've gotten a lot grumpier with peer review requests.  I've often gotten requests for fields/research that are really peripheral to what I do.  Other times when I review articles (from certain...journals), it's like my review goes into the recycling bin 🚮 and when I get a revised copy of the article for re-review, ...

  Happy New Year fellow learners and ponderererers (that's spelled right, right? 😜) Looking back, 2022 seems like an academic blur. I know that lots of things happened, and I've jotted all of them down on a notepad so I can add them to my CV as some point in the future, but as I look back five distinct threads (points of pondering) come up as trends that emerged, or became more clear, in 2022. As I started writing this, it seemed like the length was getting out of hand, so I decided to break it up into many different blog posts. My first point of pondering is... A deluge of peer review requests... Alright, maybe "deluge" might be a bit overdramatic, but it does feel like requests for peer review increased in 2022.  I've been peer reviewing since 2012 and I am not sure what exactly changed.  Did someone see my publons/WoS/ORCID profiles and decided to add me to their regular reviewer's circle? Did the addition of a doctorate to my credentials make me more visi...

Choose your Destiny Over the past month or so, IHE has published a few opinion pieces about the issues with academic peer reviews; specifically that there is a bit of a dearth of peer reviewers which is holding up the publication of papers.  For lack of a better way of explaining this, it sounds to me that older academics who write these pieces (who had privileges that current-day academics don't) seem to chalk it up to "Darn these young academics! Nobody wants to work anymore!" I suppose that one  take on the current situation, but I think it's a shitty take. I suppose that if I were still an editor at an academic journal, I might be feeling the pressure a bit more, but I am not, so I can ponder some things from a relatively disconnected position. For what it's worth, I think the field™ has done this to themselves by (1) artificially keeping tenure-style  jobs low† and (2) increasing the stress, pressure, and sometimes the opaque requirements for obtaining tenure...

 Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Dissertation proposal, draft number...I don't know - lost count - has been submitted.  Things look good, well at least in my humble view, so I hope I am ready to defend this proposal within the coming month and become a "candidate" soon‡. With the draft submitted I can now focus on the other pile of academic work that needs attending to, and is more collaborative than my dissertation. In any case, a recent incident (incident sound too austere...happening? occurrence?) I was reminded, for the umpteenth time that what we, as educational researchers, are expected to have a purpose in our research. What is the rationale for the study?  people ask. Why undertake this study?  Who benefits? What is the problem you are trying to solve? As you can tell from the title of this blog post I hold the position that I don't need no stinkin' rationale. I could make something up like "by examining population X, ...

Pondering like it's 1999 It seems like forever ago that Sarah H. posted a link to an article on Times Higher Education titled The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received .The article doesn't seem to be behind a paywall so it's worth going and having a read either before or after you read this blog post.  As I was reading this article my own thoughts about peer review, and now being a journal editor, sort of surfaced anew. I wish I had taken some notes while I was reading so that this blog post could be more rich, but  I'll just have to go from memory. One of the things that stood out to me was this: if your peer reviewers are not happy with your submission you are doing something right. OK, this is quite paraphrased, but I hope I retained the original meaning.  I am not so sure I agree with this.  I've done peer review for articles and when I am not happy (well, "convinced" would be a better word) is when there are methodological issues, or l...