Kitchin, Rob

English

Maynooth EPrints and ETheses Archive

The editor’s role in refereeing: a response to

Johnston and Pattie

NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive

Maynooth University ePrints and eTheses Archive

MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library

Observation 455The editor’s role in refereeing: a response to Johnston and PattieRob KitchinNIRSA and Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland Email: Rob.Kitchin@nuim.ie Revised manuscript received 21 July 2005We are all very busy, with many things to do in alimited time. But isn’t refereeing – like teaching,examining and writing references for colleagues andstudents – one of the most important and urgent taskswe do? (Johnston and Pattie 2004, 84)In a recent Observation piece, Johnston and Pattie(2004) bemoan the state of refereeing in thediscipline, complaining of the length of time it ispresently taking for decisions to be made onsubmissions to journals. Their solution is an appealto the professional responsibility of referees toundertake timely reviews or to decline to undertakethe review quickly so that another referee canbe found. They also note that some referees are‘deluged’ with requests, so that there is unfairimbalance in refereeing.As an editor who has been trying to deal withrequests for reviews increasingly disappearing intoblack holes (no response) or having numerousrequests turned down or having to badger refereeswho say they will referee a paper who then do notproduce a report, I have been reflecting on whatcan be done to combat the growing problem of (1)finding referees and (2) getting timely reports. Myconclusion is that rather than appealing to academics’sense of professional responsibility (which, as out-lined below, I do not believe has declined), editorsneed to change their strategy for recruiting referees.There is no doubt that in recent years the numberof submissions to the top journals (particularly thoselisted in ISI – International Scientific Index) hasincreased, several fold in many cases. This is partlyto do with a growth in the number of professionalgeographers, partly to do with research accountancyexercises that require peer-review papers, and partlyto do with pressure on non-Anglo-American authorsto publish in ISI journals. Editors therefore have manymore papers for which to find referees, yet their maintactic for finding them has changed little, namelyseeking the views of a narrow selection of ‘experts’in a field, usually those with an established academicprofile and known to the editor.Clearly, an editor is reliant on the advice of‘experts’ to make informed decisions. My worry isthat the pool of expertise being consulted is toonarrow, leading to a large imbalance of refereeingacross researchers. Conversely, much expertisewithin the discipline is little consulted. The result isan unequal expectation as to levels of professionalresponsibility with, as Johnston and Pattie note,some researchers being swamped by requests forreviews.To reflect on my own experience, for the pastthree or four years I have received requests toreview between 30 and 50 papers a year (notincluding my own load as editor of Social andCultural Geography). I am also receiving requests toreview book proposals (4–6 a year) and new jour-nal proposals. Last year, for the first time, I startedto decline to referee papers that I thought would bebetter undertaken by others, and my timeliness incompleting reviews has slipped. Despite this, myfeeling is that I am performing an adequate profes-sional service and certainly undertaking my fairshare of reviewing. A few others I know are dealingwith similar loads, and are similarly professional intheir approach. They are also now declining reviewsbecause they are inundated and have other jobs toperform. I know of others who set themselves a notunreasonable yearly quota of 10 or 15 papers toreview. And if a mid-ranking academic like myselfis receiving this number of requests, then I hate tothink what the ‘big names’ are getting. In contrast, Iknow of many colleagues who receive relativelyfew, if any, requests and there’s the rub.456 ObservationThe solution, I believe, is for editors to develop awider sense of expertise and where expertise lies; tosignificantly broaden the pool of potential reviewers,drawing increasingly from those at the start oftheir career and those working outside the Anglo-American tradition. One way to achieve this is foreditors to move beyond relying on their own knowl-edge networks, to draw more widely on their editorialboards and colleagues to identify researchers withsufficient expertise to provide a helpful review. Asecond is to implement a more systematic refereerecruitment strategy. One strategy that Social andCultural Geography has employed is to ensure thatall three referees are not from the same continent.This helps with recruitment, especially from outsidethe Anglo-American tradition (to complement thisSCG has tried to widen the international composi-tion of its editorial board), but also means that apaper speaks to an international audience. A com-plimentary strategy might be to insist that one of thereferees is near the start of their career (within fiveyears of finishing their PhD) or to seek at least onereferee from a complementary discipline.While geography is often considered a smalldiscipline compared with others, there are a largenumber of geographers globally from which to seekreviews. More than 6000 people regularly attend theAssociation of American Geographers conference,and yet the Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers probably employs less than 200 refe-rees in a year – often the same ones that every otherjournal is trying to employ. The Geography Depart-ment Worldwide website (http://univ.cc/geolinks/)lists 1102 geography departments in 90 countriesemploying several thousand geographers (a largeproportion of whom have a proficiency in English).That’s a lot of expertise waiting to be utilized, thevast majority of whom will be delighted to performtheir professional responsibilities (and similarly towrite book reviews, for which it is also becomingdifficult to find reviewers).I do not believe that there is a lack of professionalresponsibility in the discipline. I do, however, thinkthat there is an imbalance in the distribution of tasksrequiring professional responsibility. In conclusionthen, I think that editors need to be better at recog-nizing and trusting expertise across the discipline anddistributing refereeing tasks between professionalgeographers.ReferenceJohnston R J and Pattie C J 2004 On journal publication andprofessional responsibilities Area 36 84–5

http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/3874/1/RK_Editors_Role.pdf

The editor’s role in refereeing: a response to Johnston and Pattie

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Maynooth EPrints and ETheses Archive

NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive

Maynooth University ePrints and eTheses Archive

MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library