Perish by peer review

Many thanks to Sheila Webber for her entry on this blog regarding the recent Times Higher Article (THE) on peer review.  The article is well worth reading and makes several valid points.

However, a distinction should be made between peer review and anonymous peer review.  Peer review (both formally and informally) is a widespread practice in many professions (including academia).  Anonymous peer review used to be the preserve of academics, but (thanks to Web 2.0) is now a feature of 21st century life.  Anyone who has selected a restaurant on TripAdvisor is likely to be reading an anonymous review by a peer from the dining community.

One key difference is that a bad review on TripAdvisor can be countered by the business owner, and is not likely (on its own) to bring down the business.  The nascent careers of academics are more fragile.

Another key difference is that, on TripAdvisor, I can visit the restaurant and read the reviews, then assess how representative the review is of my interests and my tastes.  In other words, how much of a peer was the reviewer?

When academic peer review began, it was not anonymous.  At some time after WWII, arrangements by which journal editors informally contacted academics for advice on submitted articles appear to have been formalised in the system of anonymous peer review.  Prior to that, the interests, characters and prejudices of reviewers would have been known, resulting in greater openness and (occasionally) unrestrained unpleasantness.  However, the reviewer's credentials could be assessed and (if necessary) questioned.

One contributor to the THE article notes that, in his discipline alone (economics), there are 20,000 new journal articles every year.  The pool of reviewers must therefore be very large, prompting the question: to what extent is a reviewer a peer of the author?

The THE article ends with a contribution from an anonymous author who is is establishing a website for particularly bad examples of anonymous peer review.  I would certainly applaud such an exercise but I hope that, as well as giving the opportunity to read the poor reviews, the site also publishes the articles that attracted them.  It will be interesting to see how many suffer from poor writing, poor research and poor analysis, and how many suffer from being unorthodox and innovative.

Peer review or perish

A couple of years ago, Andrew wrote an interesting piece on peer review, which you can find here http://sheffieldischoolresearchers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/peer-review-failure-and-benefits-of.html Published yesterday in the Times Higher is a piece in which 6 academics (mostly full professors, I note) quote the worst peer reviews they ever got, and give their opinion on whether peer review should be jettisoned. The reviewer comment “What is this muck?” is one of the most arresting (in response to a paper by Prof Susan Bassnett). The last contributor chooses to remain anonymous, but is calling for examples of bad peer review to put on a website...
Times Higher Education. (2015, 6 August). The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/the-worst-piece-of-peer-review-ive-ever-received?nopaging=1

Tara Brabazon podcasts

I just came across a series of podcasts done by the Australian academic Tara Brabazon, which include a number about doing a PhD. The lastest is "Tara's ten tips for a PhD oral examination" http://tarabrabazon.libsyn.com/webpage/category/podcasts

Blog-post journal club

At the researchers' discussion yesterday (where the discussion topic was blogging), I briefly mentioned that I am co-organising a new online journal club for information literacy, that has had two blog-post discussions so far. The blog is here: http://infolitjournalclub.blogspot.co.uk/
I have also co-hosted a journal club in Second Life for a couple of years: this shows some snippets of the first meeting in 2010.





I will be talking about journal clubs in one of the future researcher discussions. Marshall Dozier (my SL Journal Club co-organiser) and I are doing some research into the club, and have done a literature search. A good starting point is:

Deenadayalan, Y. et al (2008) How to run an effective journal club: a systematic review. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 14 (5), 898-911.

Libraries and Information Society research group meeting

This is another post about a recent meeting of the Libraries and Information Society research group (last Wednesday). Angharad Roberts talked about her visit to the University of Pittsburgh iSchool, USA (which she also blogged about in the last post here). She explained some of the differences in structure and approach of the PhD programmes in Pittsburgh and at Sheffield (for example, there is a much larger taught element in the Pittsburgh programme) and we discussed a few of the pros and cons of each. As part of her visit Angharad had participated in a session about academic writing. One of the texts for this was:
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Harvard University Press.
This led on to an interesting discussion about our own experience of academic writing and in particular our use of the first person ("I"): when we felt we could use it and what the alternatives were. We also talked a little about journal editor's expectations and our experiences in submitting articles.
The next meeting of the whole group (staff and research students) is on 12th December at 3.30pm.

Using blogs for research - a discussion in Pittsburgh

On Monday, I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool about using blogs for research. This is a topic I have spoken about before at one of our monthly informal researcher discussion sessions in Sheffield and I hope this is a subject we can return to in another meeting later this year. In Pittsburgh, I began the session with a brief presentation, highlighting two UK reports which I think are relevant to this topic: Research Information Network (2011) Social Media: A Guide for Researchers and JISC (2012) Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral Students. I followed this by discussing three blogs created and maintained by members of the University of Sheffield iSchool:

• This blog - Sheffield iSchool researchers - which I think is a good example of a group blog, providing an opportunity for a number of people to author posts relating to their research or about methodological issues. I also think this is a good example of how a virtual community, based around the blog, can grow and reinforce a real world community, based around the monthly informal researchers' discussion sessions.
• Sheila Webber's Information Literacy Weblog - a really good example of an expert blog, which is a very valuable current awareness source for both academics and practitioners working in the information literacy field. Relatively short posts and lots of photos make the blog very accessible, whilst the integration of other social media tools, such as a Twitter feed and a Flickr stream, potentially broadens the blog's audience.
• My research blog, which gives a personal perspective on my experiences as a PhD student and my research activities - especially about the events I've attended.

I summarised some of my own reflections about the benefits, limitations and challenges of blogging and we then moved into a really interesting and lively group discussion about blogging for research. Now I'd like to ask you a few questions, as a reader of this blog, whether you're in Sheffield, Pittsburgh or anywhere else - perhaps we can continue the discussion here:

• If you're a new visitor to this blog, what do you think about it?
• If you've been viewing or contributing this blog for a while, what has kept you coming back?
• Have you ever referred anyone to posts on this blog? If so, which ones?
• What could we do to improve our blog?
• What are your views about blogging about research in general? Have you used a blog, or would you like to share a good example of a blog which has been useful for your research?

Finally, I'd like to offer a very warm thank you to everyone at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool who made me feel so welcome earlier this week and to everyone who took part in our discussion.

Libraries and Information Society (LIS) Research Group meeting

The LIS Research Group had a meeting yesterday, with research students and staff in attendance. Elizabeth Chapman, Halima Egberongbe, Joseph Essel, Stephen Pinfield, Angharad Roberts, Barbara Sen, Kondwani Wella and I each talked briefly about the aims and methods of our current research. Some interesting questions arose e.g. to do with sample selection and the meaning of "pragmatic" in a research context. The next meeting of staff and students on November 14 will also focus on exchange of information on current research, and the following one, on 12 December takes as its theme "How do you select a theoretical framework and research approach?"

Creativity and research: Ideas don't follow timetables.

Liz's recent entry on work-life balance touched on the difficulties of fitting creative activities into the regular pattern of a working week.  It was a theme picked up in Angharad's comment.  Her observation that "casual conversations can also often provide key insights into particular research problems" is one of the reasons why the researchers' discussion group was started, and the freewheeling discussions (especially in the pub) can prove quite liberating.  Topics range from the obscure (eg, the offside rule in Subbuteo) to the surreal (in one discussion on the relative merits of search engines, it was suggested that the only way in which Bing is better than Google is that its name sounds better when read backwards).  Often though, chats in the pub, or in the informal brunches organized by Mark Hall, are the source of ideas for future discussion meetings.

Relaxed conversation is, of course, only one factor that leads to the generation of ideas.   A day dream is said to have played a part in August Kekulé's comprehension of the structure of benzene: he claimed to have been inspired by the image of a snake eating its own tail.  

Most famous though, is the story of the original Eureka moment.  King Hieron (or Hiero) II of Syracuse commissioned a crown and provided the gold for it.  When it was delivered, he suspected the goldsmith of retaining some of the gold and replacing it with silver.  He had no idea how to confirm his suspicion, so he asked the resident court genius (Archimedes).  Archimedes also had no idea how to confirm the king's suspicion and took a bath to help de-stress.  As he climbed in, he noticed the water that spilled over the top of his over-full bath.  He realized that the volume of water displaced was equivalent to his own volume.  Appropriately used, a full tub of water could help to measure the volume of the suspect crown.  That, together with a measurement of the crown's weight, was sufficient to determine its density and thus its purity.

Archimedes was so excited by his realization that he leapt out of the bath and ran down the street yelling "Eureka" (or "I've found it").  Perhaps, therefore, if universities intstalled spas and hot tubs in their common rooms, they would have a similar effect and encourage creative streaks amongst the staff.

Conceptions of doctoral supervision

At the last researchers' meeting, when Nigel Ford talked about supervisors, I mentioned a study of supervisors' conceptions of supervising. This is the reference:

Lee, A. (2008) “How are doctoral students supervised? Concepts of doctoral research supervision.” Studies in Higher Education, 33(3), 267-281. (there is an open access copy here: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/484/)

"The main concepts [of supervising] identified are: Functional: where the issue is one of project management; enculturation: where the student is encouraged to become a member of the disciplinary community; critical thinking: where the student is encouraged to question and analyse their work; emancipation: where the student is encouraged to question and develop themselves; and developing a quality relationship: where the student is enthused, inspired and cared for. Supervisors of doctoral students are also trying to reconcile the tensions between their professional role as an academic and their personal self as well as encouraging students to move a long a path towards increasing independence. The concepts are examined in the light of each of these tensions. Finally the research illuminates the power of the supervisor’s own experience as a student and the paper suggests that supervisors need to be aware of both the positive and negative aspects of each of these conceptual approaches."
I discussed this study when I gave a presentation on Information Literacy and the role of the supervisor: a supervisor's perspective. last May

Second Life

I'm going to be talking a little bit about Second Life (SL) at the next researcher session, on 8th September. Ridvan Ata, who is researching teaching in SL, should also be joining us (I now co-supervise Ridvan with Julia Davies, in the School of Education). On the right you see me in SL (where my name is Sheila Yoshikawa) doing some washing-up.

I've given quite a few talks about SL, so I won't go into too much detail, since if you are interested, you can follow it up afterwards (or even beforehand).

SL is a 3D virtual world, in which you are represented by an avatar. You can sign up for free, but you need a special browser on your computer (also free, but CICS won't support it, so it is only installed in the smaller Departmental lab). If you want to customise your own SL space, though, you need to "rent" land. We have our own island, Infolit iSchool, which is paid up to September 2012.

This is a presentation in which I gave some basics and then talked about educational applications. You need to go to slide 13 to get the introduction to SL (I start by talking about my approach to teaching more generally):

Using Second Life as a learning environment

People do all sorts of things in SL: it isn't a game, since it doesn't have a predefined goal or plot (although you can use it e.g. for role playing games). Most of the stuff in SL has been made and sold or given away by other people using SL.
I use SL mainly for:
- Teaching
- Sharing research results
- Organising events
- Attending events
- Collecting research data
- Making contacts
- Shopping
- Doing fashion shoots
- Interior design
- Wandering about and sight seeing.
So this is a mixture of work and play. I have 3000 pictures on my flickr stream which are mostly of SL. For example, this set http://www.flickr.com/photos/23396182@N00/sets/72157624252095321/ documents an ESRC research seminar held last June, and this set http://www.flickr.com/photos/23396182@N00/sets/72157624080186940/with/6056007865/ has pictures of my SL homes
In July I gave a talk at the New Literacies research conference ("New Methods for New Literacies") held in the School of Education about Researching by/with/from Second Life. I thought I would draw on some of that material for the session on 8th September. I produced a short video about ways in which research results can be presented in SL, which I hope to show on 8th September, but I also embed it below.

I have become interested in issues to do with collecting and analysing visual data in SL, and I intend to say a little about this aspect.