Re: [tlug] Journals, Authors and 'Free Peer Review'

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

Hi,

Sorry...was quite busy the last few days...


On Wednesday, September 26, 2018 01:54 AM, Stephen J. 
Turnbull wrote:
>   > On 2018-09-20 22:14 +0800 (Thu), Raymond Wan wrote:
>
>   > > I'm not so sure if this works as it seems to be a way for authors
>   > > to "have their cake and eat it".... They get "free peer review"
>   > > via their peers on Twitter...
>
> Actually, they don't.  People who are really good do, people who are
> second tier (which is pretty damn good, actually, except for the
> following) or below generally end up in circular pity parties where
> they're always commiserating with each other on how their great papers
> are getting ignored in favor of the second-rate proteges of star
> professors.  (All of which is true except the phrase "great papers" --
> the research may be great but the papers are poorly written so nobody
> can tell.)  I find it hard to believe that this varies much across
> fields.  WDOT?


Yes -- well, everything in life is like one big pyramid 
scheme.  I don't think academia or research in general is 
any different.  ;-(


> What Twitter is good for is self-promotion (by individuals or cells).
> Of course, the top half of researchers probably contains most of the
> top half of self-marketers, but the correlation is imperfect, and some
> really good researchers get a lot less attention than they deserve.


Yes, Twitter is probably used that way and those (like me) 
who have yet to embrace it probably suffer.  A big part of 
research is about self-promotion but I think it does vary 
from field to field.  (I mean the extent to which it happens.)


> office staff.  Top-notch staff can handle the nasty work of phoning
> late reviewers and the like, which speeds up the mess, which makes
> submission to the journal much more attractive (it makes a lot of
> sense to submit to a #1 journal with an 0.5% acceptance rate if you
> know you'll get a desk reject in less than two weeks and a usually
> competent review in 2 months if you get that far).


I'd probably like to tack on staff that create a 
well-written web site that explains the entire submission 
process as well as journals that have staff that actually 
respond to queries.  They do a lot of work behind the scenes.

I don't know how much they make, but like any job, they need 
to be paid enough to want to stay in their job.


> My interpretation is different: outside of the top 50-100 people so in
> most fields, typically distributed across the top 20 to 50
> departments, almost all researchers are quite narrow.  It's very
> common now to have 5 or 6 mutually exclusive cliques in an economics
> department, for example, where they claim no ability to assess the
> quality of other cliques' research or students (and all too often
> they're right!)  The result is that almost all research universities
> now demand "objective" measures such as citation counts and impact
> factors for the journals of publication, and even student evaluations
> of teaching, to support tenure and promotion decisions.  The
> administrations don't trust their faculty to make good decisions; it's
> not just Americans' litigiousness when tenure is denied.  But the
> crudest measure is publication count, and and it's the easiest to
> bolster very quickly by submitting to pay- for-publication journals.


All of this makes sense to me.

Just wondering -- do you (or anyone else reading) have a 
take on the "h-index"?  I noticed a greater and greater 
emphasis on it.  It seems like a useful measure over (say) a 
publication count.  But the emphasis on it makes it seem 
like if one's h-index isn't high, then "we don't want to 
talk to you".

Ray